Abstract
THE eighteenth volume of the Annual of the British School at Athens for the session 1911-12 is fully up to the level of this excellent series. The chief archaeological article gives an account by Messrs. A. J. B. Wace and M. S. Thompson of the excavations at Halos, one of the smaller and less-known cities in Thessaly. A group of tombs at the foot of the acropolis was opened. Such cist graves formed of slabs are common in Thessaly, both in the fourth prehistoric period and in the Early Iron Age, to which the Halos tombs belong. Here there is no sign of cremation, simple inhumation being the only process. On the other hand, the excavation of a neighbouring tumulus proved that here corpses were burned. Thus in these two cemeteries we find two different methods of disposal of the dead. From an examination of the pottery and fibulae it seems clear that the cremation tumulus is of a date later than that of the cist graves, and it may be referred to the middle of the so-called Geometric period, about the ninth century B.C. NO exact parallel to this type of cremation burial has yet been found in Greece or elsewhere, and it differs from that of Halstatt and the rites described in the Homeric poems in some important particulars. The tumulus is clearly post-Homeric, and may be an Achaean burial in a degenerate or modified form.
The Annual of the British School at Athens.
No. xviii. Session 1911-1912. Pp. viii + 362 + 15 plates. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., n.d.) Price 25s. net.
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The Annual of the British School at Athens . Nature 92, 266 (1913). https://doi.org/10.1038/092266a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/092266a0