Description
Richard B. Seager excavated the Minoan cemetery at Pseira in 1907, but the work was never published. The Temple University excavations (1985–1994) under the direction of Philip P. Betancourt and Costis Davaras conducted an intensive surface survey of the cemetery area, cleaned and drew plans of all visible tombs, and excavated tombs that had not been previously excavated. The results of the cemetery excavations on the small island off the northeast coast of Crete are published in two volumes. Pseira VI publishes the methodology that was employed for the investigation, the topography of the cemetery area, the little that can be reconstructed of Seager’s campaign, the ceramic petrography for the cemetery pottery, and the results of the intensive surface survey. The survey shows that the cemetery was first used in the Neolithic period, and it was abandoned in Middle Minoan II, before the expansion of the nearby town in LM I. It also demonstrates that the cemetery was larger than the area suggested by the 33 tombs found by Seager, and it shows that the customs included burial in jars, even though no examples have been excavated.
Contents: PART I. INTRODUCTION: 1. Introduction to the Cemetery Investigations (Philip P. Betancourt, Costis Davaras, Julie Ann Clark, William R. Farrand, and Carola H. Stearns); 2. The Excavations of Richard Seager (Philip P. Betancourt); 3. Methodology for the Intensive Surface Survey in the Cemetery (Richard Hope Simpson and Philip P. Betancourt); 4. The Topography of the Pseira Cemetery (Lada Onyshkevych, Katherine E. May, William B. Hafford, and Harrison Eiteljorg II); 5. The Cemetery in its Context (Philip P. Betancourt); PART II. THE DATA: 6. Data from the Intensive Surface Survey (Philip P. Betancourt, Heidi M.C. Dierckx, Natalie Poulou-Papadimitriou, David S. Reese, Werner H. Schoch, and Fotini Zervaki); PART III. INFORMATION FROM THE SURVEY OF PSEIRA ISLAND: 7. Data from the Intensive Surface Survey of Pseira Island (Philip P. Betancourt and Richard Hope Simpson); 8. The Threshing Floor at Site Q 22 (Philip P. Betancourt and Vasso Zographaki); 9. The Border of the Cemetery (Philip P. Betancourt and Richard Hope Simpson); PART IV. INTERPRETATION AND CONCLUSIONS: 10. Comments and Conclusions (Philip P. Betancourt). Appendices: A. Concordance of Excavation Numbers; B. Locations of Tombs by Grid-Square or Context; C. Petrographic Analysis of Ceramics from the Pseira Cemetery (Sarah J. Vaughan).
Hardback: 215 pp., 15 pp. B/W figs, 4 pp. B/W photos.
(Prehistory Monographs 5, INSTAP Academic Press, 2002)
ISBN-10: 1-931534-04-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-931534-04-8