Peter’s Reviews > The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age > Status Update

If I take one single salient detail from Sigrid Deger-jalkotzy’s chapter, “decline, destruction, Aftermath,” it’s the complexity of Mycenae’s conclusion. While Linear B receded into the past, weapon, textile, and ceramic manufacturing seemed to flourish. Also, decentralized polities and social organization benefited from the erasure of palatial culture. The dark ages clearly didn’t fall all at once.

In his chapter, Mycenaean Greece, the Aegean, and Beyond, Christopher Mee looks at clay analysis and textual analysis of letters between monarchs. There give us glimpses of Mycenaean trade, but can never close the book whether Mycenaeans traveled, relocated, or sold their wares overseas. Places like Sardinia, Egypt, and Asia Minor show local manufacture took place, but that doesn’t prove corporeal presence.

Thomas palaima does a fantastic job of showing why ancient religion is difficult for archaeologists to pin down, given the absence of written epics in Mycenaean records and the complexity of correlating words in Linear B texts with deities or practices. If it’s not depicted graphically and there aren’t transactional records, nailing down a votive offering to a specific deity’s temple is nigh impossible.

In his chapter in Mycenaean burial customs, William Cavanagh gives excellent detail on the various types of graves and rites associated with mainland Helladic death practices.

Laura Preston cautions us not to forget or write off Crete during the Mycenaean ascendancy, and given the number of Linear B tablets and what they tell us about administration and commerce, her point is well made.

A wonderfully dense and detailed section about administration and economy in Mycenaean society. A lot of discussion about the details we can glean from the Linear B texts (like volumes of wool, sheep, metals, etc) and what we can NOT, like the lives of individuals who made or traded commodities they were owed to the palace. This is the kind of chapter I will need to read two or three times, and that’s okay.

Janice Crowley’s article on Mycenaean art and architecture does a superb laying out the Koine of late Bronze Age Helladic ornamentation, building, and attire. What’s more, this article whisks me. Ack to the Athens and Heracleion archaeology museums, not only reprising what I saw, but in fact placing it all in the context I lacked when I was physically there. I loved this article and will probably reread it.

In James Clinton Wright’s meticulous article, Early Mycenaean Greece, our focus sifts from the Cycladic’s and Crete to Mainland Greece. An excellent use of surrogate variables, this article discusses the ways which we gauge population growth, elite status, and agricultural practices.

Philip Betancourt discusses the goods and the trade routes which Minoans bought and sold through various Bronze Age periods. He correlates the size and power of the neopalatial centers at Knossos and others, with a focus on certain harbors for mooring ships. An exploration of metals, their origins, and how they arrived on Crete raises the question — where did tin com from? Afghanistan, like lapis lazuli?

Jack L Davis’ article Minoan Crete and the Aegean Islands examines the material culture of a number of settlements in the Aegean which argue for Cretan expansion, but the strengths of this work lie in his cautions against glib and facile assumptions about the people who built these settlements and whether they were local or immigrants to the islands.