This publication is the latest in the series of final publications of the results of the Kavousi Project in East Crete.[1] It contains the description and analysis of the Early Iron Age (hereafter EIA) burials at the site of Vronda, located in and around the earlier Late Minoan IIIC settlement at the site, which were cleaned and excavated between 1981 and 1992. Kavousi IV consists of two parts, one containing the text and the other tables, charts, and images.
The burials at Vronda consist of two sets of tombs, which are treated separately throughout much of the publication, since they differ significantly in chronology, architecture, and burial practices. These differences have led the excavators to argue that they likely represent two separate burying populations that strategically used the site of Vronda to construct group identity. The earlier burials consist of several small tholos tombs periodically in use between the Subminoan phase and the earlier eighth century BCE (catalogued in Chapter 2), almost all of which had been previously emptied by looting, local landowners, and the excavations of Harriet Boyd at the site in 1900.[2] The Kavousi Project was able to identify and clean most of these tombs, as well as to excavate a number of their undisturbed pseudo-dromoi. The later enclosure graves (catalogued in Chapter 3) were in use between the later eighth and late seventh centuries and are the dominant focus of the volume, given their better preservation and greater quantity. In contrast to the tholoi, these graves were set into the ruined buildings of the earlier Late Minoan IIIC settlement and the majority of the burials that they contain are primary cremations, with a small number of secondary cremations and inhumations also represented. The material from the earlier tombs is much more fragmentary than that of the later enclosure graves, and the consequent difficulty in placing the two sets of burial assemblages on an equal interpretive footing is a problem returned to frequently throughout the volume.
Subsequent chapters describe, analyze, and synthesize the human remains and the cremation process, the faunal and botanical remains, the funerary architecture, the pottery and the petrography of the fabrics, and the non-pottery finds. The volume concludes with two chapters reconstructing the burial customs that are legible in the mortuary record at Vronda and, through them, parts of the history and social structure of these communities. Three appendices present an analysis of vessel capacities from the Vronda burials; an analysis of metals and metalliferous objects from the Kastro settlement and Vronda; and a concordance of inventory and catalogue numbers. The volume is admirably thorough in its presentation of the excavated material. There is regular repetition of the description and synthesis of various sets of material throughout the volume, but this is likely to be felt only when reading it cover to cover, a relatively unusual method of engagement with this type of excavation publication. Each chapter can effectively stand on its own and therefore makes the volume easy to reference. Especially beneficial in this sense are the redundant reproductions of certain architectural and object drawings to accompany both tomb-specific catalogues and synthetic discussions of the pottery and other finds types, reducing the amount of flipping required between figures.
The analysis of the pottery, and to a certain extent the non-pottery finds, epitomizes the typologizing habit of this type of publication. This volume interacts with earlier publications of EIA Cretan pottery in ways that highlight the analytical possibilities — but also the limitations — of this approach to interpreting burial contexts in the absence of well-published stratified settlement contexts. Kavousi IV relies heavily on parallels from the North Cemetery at Knossos,[3] the Orthi Petra cemetery at Eleutherna,[4] and (primarily cemetery) sites across East Crete.[5] There is regular disagreement between these publications on what to call certain vessel shapes or on what formal criteria to use to place individual vessels into existing shape categories. A prominent example is what to call a certain type of closed vessel sometimes (but not always) used to hold cremated remains, usually in formal comparison with other shapes: a pithos, a pyxis, a necked jar? In other cases, differences in labeling reflect interpretations of function, as in the case of the vessels called mug-like cups at Vronda (function: drinking) and wide-mouthed oinochoai elsewhere (function: pouring).[6] Such labeling choices reflect whether the authors of a publication are more interested in formalism or functionalism, and in lumping or splitting. Kavousi IV is a prime example of the splitting tendency in that it tries to resist category slippages and overlaps through detailed typologies between and within many ceramic shapes along a range of formal criteria (a reference chart of these typologies would have been a useful accompaniment to the text and images, since the divisional criteria change from shape to shape). In many cases, types are represented by very small numbers (for example, the four catalogued stirrup jars from the tholos tombs are divided into three types), leaving the boundary between norms and exceptions in this new body of published material unclear: when is it worth creating a typological category and what is worth describing as an idiosyncratic exemplar? Nevertheless, this approach is the standard procedure for this type of primary publication and Kavousi IV will provide useful comparanda for other sites, particularly in its infilling of the ceramic picture of East Crete.
One of the projects of this volume that this typologizing supports is to address the challenge of developing regional chronologies on Crete. Because of the well-published nature of the Knossos material, the relative chronological sequence of Central Crete is generally used as the standard reference for the rest of the island. This volume adds to a body of scholarship demonstrating that there was a temporal lag and idiosyncratic uptake in the transmission of Central Cretan styles to East Crete.[7] In general, the pottery in the Vronda burials maintains many Protogeometric shapes into the eighth century, only catching up to contemporary Central Cretan fashions in the Late Geometric period, while many of the decorative motifs on vessels reflect more current styles. Many catalogued vessels therefore have good comparanda dating between the tenth and eighth centuries, which means that the authors routinely face the decision of assigning a date to a Vronda vessel based either on style (bringing into play the question of the deposition of heirlooms in graves in the case of early-looking pottery and other objects, which is touched on a number of times throughout the volume) or on context (in the case of the enclosure graves, which all appear to have been used between Late Geometric and Late Orientalizing based on the latest pottery styles). This dilemma, frequently revisited throughout the volume, is highly revealing of both the current state of EIA ceramic studies in East Crete and of the challenges of developing relative chronologies from non-stratified contexts.
Dating and sequencing the two groups of burials is an important part of the overarching aim of the volume: to explain why the LM IIIC settlement was revisited as a burial site in later centuries and also why there was a radical change in the method and style of burial in the eighth century from inhumations in tholoi to primary cremations in enclosures. The authors argue that the tholoi were used sporadically for burials for multiple centuries. They never explain, however, why they believe that all pottery recovered from these heavily disturbed tombs must have accompanied a burial event, a discussion that would have complemented (or perhaps complicated) their discussion of the hill as a site of multi-generational collective memory. They argue that the tholoi were likely used by descendants of the Vronda community after that population moved to the Kastro at the end of LM IIIC, while direct ancestral connections to the site were a matter of living memory. The hill was then coopted by a different group in the late eighth century, which radically transformed burial customs and location, possibly in order to create a new (likely fictive) ancestral connection to the ruined houses to legitimate territorial or other political claims within the Kavousi region. In order to support this argument, the assumption must be that the use of the tholoi and perhaps even their visibility was no longer a matter of direct memory or use. However, if some of the tholoi were used for burial as late as the pottery that they contained (see Table 26), there may have been some overlap between the burials in the latest of the tholoi (II, IV, V, VII, IX, XI) and the earliest of the enclosure burials (GR9, GR19), which would offer the potential for a more direct continuity of ancestral memory and use of Vronda for burial and also a more pointed rupture in burial practice that the authors do not consider.
This rupture in practice is marked by a switch to primary cremation in particular, which had not previously been practiced in the Kavousi region and is rare on Crete in the EIA. The experimental cremations described in the chapter on cremation process demonstrate that the architectural form of the enclosures was specifically suited to containing and stabilizing pyres. Despite sporadic attestations of the use of cremation in East Crete during the LBA-EIA transition and the widespread adoption of secondary cremation in Central Crete in the Protogeometric period, it is not self-evident why one part of the burying population at Vronda decided to switch to this practice only in the Late Geometric period. The volume argues that a specific burying group used the spectacle of cremation as a new method of displaying status and cementing in-group identity during a transitional phase in the Kavousi region, leading to the reorganization of the settlement system in the seventh century with the abandonment of the Kastro and the reoccupation of Azoria. This argument is a compelling one that not only fits with the available evidence but also centers the creativity of the local population rather than assuming a passive adoption of external innovations or fashions.
The volume is well-produced overall and is a valuable new resource, with a few caveats. Some of the excavation photographs would have benefitted from slight enlargement, particularly those meant to illustrate a smaller detail within a grave. More importantly, a number of textual errors require the reader to cross-reference other portions of the volume or cited sources in order to correct them. Some of these errors are typographical (e.g., “E” instead of “EPG” [p. 17]; “Fig. 20” instead of “Fig. 22” [p. 32]; “GR20 P15” instead of “GR20 P14” [p. 147]; images of pottery with the wrong grave label [Plate 32D]). Percentages presented in the text are also occasionally calculated incorrectly (e.g., p. 223: 98% should be 68%) and/or shift throughout a section without sufficiently clear indication that the total group being referenced has changed (e.g., p. 337–8: primary cremation burials appear to be listed as both 89% and 81% of the total burials in the enclosure graves), which will require anyone wishing to cite the statistics presented in this volume to double-check the authors’ calculations.
Notes
[1] Note that Kavousi III, the publication of the LM IIIC shrine at Vronda, is not yet published; the existing published series consists of Kavousi I, Kavousi II (A, B, C), and now Kavousi IV. See BMCR reviews of Kavousi I (BMCR 2007.03.13) and Kavousi IIC (BMCR 2018.05.06).
[2] Boyd, H. 1901. “Excavations at Kavousi, Crete, in 1900.” AJA 5: 125–57.
[3] Coldstream, J.N. and H.W. Catling (eds). 1996. Knossos North Cemetery: Early Greek Tombs. London: The British School at Athens.
[4] Kotsonas, A. 2008. The Archaeology of Tomb A1K1 of Orthi Petra in Eleutherna: The Early Iron Age Pottery. Athens: Publications of the University of Crete.
[5] Tsipopoulou, M. 2005. Η ανατολική Κρήτη στην πρώιμη εποχή του σιδήρου. Ηράκλειο: Αρχαιολογικό Ινστιτούτο Κρητολογικών Σπουδών.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Coldstream, J.N. 2008. Greek Geometric Pottery. A Survey of Ten Styles and their Chronology. 2nd ed. Exeter: Bristol Phoenix Press; Mook, M.S. 2004. “From Foundation to Abandonment: New Ceramic Phasing for the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age on the Kastro at Kavousi.” In Crete Beyond the Palaces: Proceedings of the Crete 2000 Conference, edited by L.P. Day, M.S. Mook, and J. Muhly, 163–79. Philadelphia: INSTAP Academic Press.