Kamares Ware

Kamares Ware is one of the most famous pottery styles in archaeology. Its shapes and creative decorations have been differentially studied in the past, mainly from a stylistic perspective. However, its complexity and the fragmented state of the Middle Minoan Cretan contexts have at times hindered our attempts to make sense of its horizontal and vertical dynamics of transmission. Publications accumulated in decades have produced descriptions of Kamares Ware pottery styles from various centres around Crete. These genealogies of pots illustrate continuity in both material forms and correlated practices that lasted for several generations. By looking at style from the perspective of Material Engagement Theory and radical enactive theories of cognition, I illustrate that the long-term development of the Knossian Kamares style describes something more than a succession of forms and decorations: a novel form of memory. Specifically, I argue that the Knossian Kamares style is a form of transgenerational memory continually re-created every time potters made new vessels in this style. Furthermore, by rethinking the notion of autobiographical memory from psychology and the cognitive sciences, I present for the first time the idea that transgenerational memory might also be productive of identity.

ABSTRACT: This documentary response sheet contains a series of sequential questions drawn from the video, Acorn: The Minotaur's Island (shown in-class; also available online via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LZ6JzBcXjU [95 minutes]).  These sequential questions aim to maximize both student attention to various pertinent points made throughout the documentary and greater retention of the materials covered by the documentary.  In addition, the documentary has been vetted for overall content accuracy (albeit updated and/or corrected in-class), and selected to provide supplementary visual aids (e.g., images of regions, sites, finds, and other materials), additional specialist views (e.g., interviews), and other data to aid in student comprehension of the course lectures and readings from the textbooks.  REVISED: Feb., 2024.

Il Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico «Luigi Pigorini» di Roma conserva una cospicua raccolta di manufatti cretesi giunti al museo a seguito delle missioni archeologiche italiane condotte a Creta (siti di Festòs ed Haghia Triada) tra il 1900 ed il 1910 da Federico Halbherr e da Luigi Pernier. Tra i reperti si annovera un numero consistente di ceramiche integre e frammentarie ascrivibili allo stile di Kamares, diffusosi a Creta nel periodo Protopalaziale.
Tuttavia, poco ancora si conosce sulla natura e sulla composizione dei pigmenti utilizzati nelle decorazioni, anche se è ormai consolidato che le conoscenze della consistenza fisica e chimica dei pigmenti possono essere un utile supporto per l’inquadramento storico e archeologico dei reperti.
Questa breve trattazione si inserisce in tale ambito e concerne l’analisi preliminare tramite Spettroscopia Micro-Raman di due frammenti di ceramica Kamares conservati nel Museo Pigorini di Roma caratterizzati dalla presenza del pigmento arancione nel motivo decorativo. Questi studi saranno confrontati con quelli su due campioni della stessa produzione vascolare conservati nel Museo Archeologico di Firenze per i quali è già stata effettuata l’indagine archeometrica dei colori.

This paper presents an overview of the MM IIA-IIB vessels recovered at the site of Phaistos, characterized by decorations impressed by stamping devices. The high number of vases collected, mainly unpublished, and the great variety of impressed motifs suggest a strong local specialization for this approach to ceramic ornamentation. Some stylistic, technical and iconographical aspects also offer some interesting comparisons with the signs that compose the stamped inscription of the much-debated Phaistos Disc, a clay artefact impressed with similar stamping devices. In my opinion, although some virtually unparalleled features do exist, these relevant affinities with the Impressed Fine Ware strongly argue for the rehabilitation of the Phaistos Disc as a Middle Minoan and genuine artefact, and one that is specifically Phaistian.

SUMMARY: Lecture 12 discusses the end of Early Minoan period, the rise of Middle Minoan period, and the emergence of palace centres on Crete. This lecture is designed mainly as an educational resource for college students (i.e., normally posted only on my institution's course website), the public (e.g., people auditing my course), and interested colleagues from other disciplines (to whom I provide copies privately).  I am posting it here, both as a broader access, educational tool, and especially to promote the study of this region and its past societies.  For further knowledge about this region and period, I refer interested parties to the textbooks and other sources from which the materials were extracted (see syllabus), and/or the bibliographies in these works and my online resource guides (see other files in my academia folders).  The lecture summarizes the pertinent materials in the course textbook(s), adding in other data, and furnishing numerous images to clarify information encountered within the textbook(s).  Some generic imagery (usually indicated as such) is posted to aid in transmitting various concepts visually, and/or when a specific image remains not located (temporarily).  I update and revise such lectures each time, with such elective courses normally being taught once every two years.  I try to cover the most current, mainstream views, and usually place summary notes at the end of each lecture alongside some of the key sources used for compiling the ppt.  Over time, each lecture is improved, errors rectified, and additional data placed within the lecture.  These ppt. lectures take many hours to compile, but they have proved useful to many of my more serious students and I hope they can be of benefit to others as well.  My apologies for any errors I may have made, and my liberal usage of educational imagery from professional sources and vetted internet sources. REVISED: Feb., 2024: Some new formatting, revised text, images, etc.

Ms. Penina Mezei has been involved in an archaeological project taking place in Crete, Greece.
Crete itself being the largest island located about 200km south of the Greece mainland is a magnificent site on its own. It was home of the Minoan culture and civilization many many years ago... and that is the target of this project - to find relics from the Minoan past.
As an expert in medicine, Penina Mezei was hired to look at some old biological data, potential human bones and other related things. She got excited immediately and was on the first plane to Europe.
The excavation site will be left out or censored for security purposes. The most interesting thing is that there are tons of excavation sites, but only some of them are real gold mines (in terms of historical significance).
The most interesting news came on the forth day, when something of real significance really happened. The other 3 days were full of just physical work and nothing of historical meaning....

An important feature of the Minoan culture is the pottery of Kamares style, that documents the Cretan cultural production between the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. This high level painted production, characterized by the combination of several
diverse motifs, presents an enormous decorative repertoire. The extraordinary variety of combinations between elementary motifs according to a complex visual syntax makes interesting the automatic identification of the motifs, particularly upon potsherds.
A complete pipeline to accomplish this task is still a challenge to Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. Starting from a digital image ROI identification, motif extraction, robust contour detection should be performed to obtain a bag of digital shapes. In a second phase each of the extracted shapes has to be classified according to prototypes in a database produced by an expert. The co-occurrence of the different shapes in a specimen will, in turn, be used to help the archaeologists in the cultural and even chronological setting.