Abstract:

Handmade Burnished Ware from late Mycenaean contexts has been interpreted variously as a unified ceramic assemblage, a conflation of different indigenous coarse-ware traditions, evidence for intrusive ethnic elements in the Mycenaean world, a symptom of the economic and systemic decline of the palace elite, and the re-emergence of the Aegean peasant substrata as the destructions of the Late Bronze Age took their toll. The authors propose that it may represent the ceramic tradition of people brought into Greece from the Balkans and other areas beyond the Mycenaean periphery, and could be investigated through comparison with models developed in the New World and through the study of the technology of production.

Author: H. Arthur Bankoff, Nathan Meyer, Mark Stefanovich