The Wider Island of Pelops: Studies on Prehistoric Aegean Pottery in Honour of Professor Christopher Mee

This volume explores the myriad ways in which pottery was created, utilized, and experienced in the prehistoric Aegean, across a period of more than 4000 years between the Middle Neolithic and the Early Iron Age transition.

''[A] varied collection of papers covering interesting material and offering valuable insights on many topics.'' – Oliver Dickinson (2024): Journal of Greek Archaeology

‘The Wider Island of Pelops is a substantial contribution to ceramic studies in the Aegean, highlighting the central role pottery played in the lives of prehistoric people and how fundamental it still is to the discipline. ...The initial chapter detailing his life (‘Professor Christopher Mee [1950–2013]’), however, serves as a poignant and a touching tribute to a remarkable scholar and human being, a sentiment echoed through the combined effort of the contributors to this volume.’ – Christopher Nuttall (2024): Opuscula 17

The Wider Island of Pelops explores the myriad ways in which pottery was created, utilized, and experienced in the prehistoric Aegean, across a period of more than 4000 years between the Middle Neolithic and the Early Iron Age transition. Pottery is capable both of creating bonds and creating barriers. It serves as a sociocultural call and response, marking similarity and difference, collectivism and individualism, knowledge, and the absence of knowledge. Contextually-bound, it embodies identities, memories and multiple histories. It reflects choice and reinforces orthodoxy; a product of change, and a driver of it, that both creates and curates understanding of the world. Necessity and commodity, at times anachronistic, and at others, avant-garde, it is subversive and slavish, innovative and derivative; visible always, and never without value.

The seventeen papers collected here provide a diachronic perspective on the value of pottery in marking and mediating cross-scale sociocultural discourse; in framing and facilitating the transmission of knowledge and meaning; in driving economies; in the preservation of memory, in the practice of cult; and, in more recent times, as a vector in the dialogue of imperialism: at once introducing key themes in the study of Aegean pottery, and providing a snapshot of recent archaeological work in Greece.

• | Author: Angelos Papadopoulos, William G. Cavanagh, David Michael Smith
• | Publisher: Archaeopress
• | Publication Date: Mar 23, 2023
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781803273280
• | ISBN-10: 1803273283