The Little Palace at Knossos. The Temple Tomb at Knossos.
Final publication of two Late Bronze Age buildings excavated by Sir Arthur Evans.
Eleni M. Hatzaki

The publication of two Bronze Age sites in the Minoan Town of Knossos on the island of Crete will be the subject of a two year research project which will be carried out in Crete, Athens and Oxford. My aim is to produce final reports on both sites, which will he submitted for publication to the British School Supplementary Volumes Series and the BSA Studies or Annual. Both publications will be undertaken in relation to the celebrations for the Centenary of Evans’ excavations at the Palace and town of Knossos; which marked the birth of Minoan Archaeology.

The Little Palace was the subject of my D.Phil. In Classical Archaeology at Oxford. It was suggested and supervised by Mr. M.R. Popham and examined by Professor Sir John Boardman and Mr. Gerald Cadogan. Permission to study and publish the Little Palace and its finds was granted by the British School at Athens and the Department of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities of the Greek Ministry of Culture. The thesis was awarded The Hellenic Foundation Tenth Annual Award for the best thesis in the United Kingdom in the Ancient/Classical Period, Archaeology and History categoiy for 1995. It will be published as a monograph in the BSA Supplementary Volume Series. It is estimated that a six month's period is required in order to prepare a camera ready manuscript, should I be awarded a grant from the Shelby White-Leon Levy Program.

The Little Palace is a Neo-palatial building (c. 1500-1300 BC) of the Minoan town at Knossos Crete., which was excavated by Sir Arthur Evans in the 1900's. It is located some 250 metres north-west of the Bronze Age Palace at Knossos. This study is the first comprehensive exatnination of the building and its finds ainung to define its chronological phases and outline its history. The book presents a detailed account on the excavation through the notebooks of Arthur Evans and his assistant Dunkan Mackenzie. The archaeological evidence is organized in several chapters according to classic categories of material. The architecture is presented in a separate chapter, which includes a study of the exterior walls and 37 rooms of the Little Palace, an analysis of the building materials and techniques, in order to define architectural phases, 21 elevations of facades and interior walls in addition to the six cross sections to the building. In this study, the preserved pottery is the subject of a separate chapter. The problems and limitations imposed by the nature of the material are illustrated; a stylistic analysis of the pottery phases is presented and finally the material is used to demonstrate possible events in the building's history. Over 400 complete or fragmentary vases are catalogued and drawn. Subsequent chapters present the Little Palace clay tablets in Linear B, the 150 sealstone impressions pressed on lumps of clay (sealings), sealstones, stone vases and other small finds. Finally, the history of the Little Palace is reconstructed from its construction date ending with the desertion of the site. An essential part of the thesis was devoted to the definition of the date of a fire destruction which preserved a small number of tablets in the Linear B script and over a hundred sealstone impressions preserved in lumps of clay. A thorough examination of the architectural remains in relation to the kept pottery and the excavation records came in support of an early LM IIIA date (c. l375 BC), linking this event to the the destruction of the Knossos Palace as defined by M.R. Popham. The archaeological material under study includes all the published and unpublished material of the Little Palace from Evans' excavation together with the pottery sherds from the makeup of walls, which were collected during a recent restoration work by the KG’ Ephoria of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities.

Arthur Evans’ The Palace of Minos at Knossos is more of an overall study of the Minoan civilization rather than a detailed publication of his excavations. Therefore, much research is needed to be carried out on different aspects of his explorations on the capital of Minoan Crete. The `Temple Tomb', which is located south of the Knossos Palace was discovered and fully excavated by Evans and John Pendlebury in 1931. The building's location; beyond the Late Bronze Age boundaries of the Minoan town, taolether with its unique for Crete architectural arrangement pose questions as to its function within Minoan society. Evans, who was in no doubt of the funeral and cultic nature of the building, envisaged the inner chamber to be a burial plot with the ground and upper floor of the `Temple' devoted to rituals and worship. The discovery of human remains heaped behind a blocking wall, were attributed by Evans to "earthquake victims'', whereas a great number of ceramic vessels were associated with an ongoing memorial cult. The finds cover a period of over three hundred years and should reflect upon events in the history of Knossos such as, its rise as capital of Minoan Crete during the Neopalatial period (c. 1600 BC), the effect of the eruption of Thera (c. 1500 BC), the arrival of Mycenaean speaking Greeks, after the 1450 BC destructions, and finally the fall Knossian administration around 1375 BC.