The Archæology of Crete

Abstract

IT was in 1894 that Sir Arthur Evans made his o*o first journey in Crete, and in 1899 that his excavation of Knossos commenced. His own account of “The Palace of Minos” began to appear in 1921 and was completed in 1936. From time to time others have tried to summarize both the progress of discovery in Crete and the general bearings of it on the prehistoric archaeology of the Mediterranean. But Mr. Pendlebury's book is the first thorough and satisfactory account of the work of many travellers and excavators; his numerous maps show how vast an accumulation there has been of observations and finds, and the lists of sites appended to them how much he has himself contributed by persistent exploration, covering now every district of the island. As curator formerly of Knossos, where the Palace and its surroundings have been made over by Sir Arthur Evans to the British School of Archaeology at Athens, he has not only written an invaluable “Handbook to the Palace”, but has also himself examined and catalogued the stores of classified objects from every room and corridor, and from every stratum from the neolithic tell on which the Minoan settlements stand, to the sparse relics of classical antiquity, when the site had become a ‘no-man's-land’ in the outskirts of the Greek and Roman city. After directing excavations at Tell-el-Amarna, the Egyptian site most closely connected with Eugean peoples in the fourteenth century B.C., just after the fall of the ‘Palace’ regime, he has devoted himself to a series of small but most significant excavations in the Lasithi district of Crete itself, on sites ranging from the earliest human occupation to the turbulent age which intervenes between the latest Minoan and the earliest Hellenic periods. Here are, therefore, all the qualifications for an “Introduction”, as the author modestly describes it, to the archaeology of Crete.

The Archæology of Crete

An Introduction. By J. D. S. Pendlebury. (Methuen's Handbooks of Archæology.) Pp. xxxii + 400 + 43 plates. (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1939.) 30s. net.