Articles about Grey Ware from Greece

A Survey of Grey Wares on Crete in Middle and Late Bronze Age

by Luca Girella

(23 June 2007)

Interest in Grey Wares on Crete increased over the past years thanks to new finds and contributions, which have provided an occasion for an update on pottery imported from outside Crete and also on wheel-made grey ware. Recent overviews have also expanded the list of the LM III evidence to some extent. As this overview will show, the data have not increased in recent years, with the exception of Kommos and Chania; on the contrary, most of the information comes from old excavations and publications, from a time when both the identification and terminology of this ware were far from being easily recognizable (i.e. the use of term bucchero).

On the origin of the wheel-made Grey Ware found in Central Macedonia

by Reinhard Jung

(10 June 2007)

Wheel-made Grey Ware of the Early Iron Age (EIA) in Macedonia is a pottery category well-known to archaeologists working in the region. Other scholars may not be very be familiar with it, as it has never been treated in an exhaustive study exclusively devoted to this topic. Now, stratified finds from recent excavations enable a reassessment of the old problem concerning the derivation of this pottery category. While the class might have been first noted by Hubert Schmidt, it was defined for the first time by Stanley Casson, a British archaeologist who during World War I had worked in areas of Central Macedonia held by the Entente troops. His excavations in the Early Iron Age necropolis of Chauchitsa brought to light several examples of the type fossil of this Macedonian pottery class: a one-handled carinated cup with a high-swung handle.

Grey Wares as a Phenomenon

by Peter Pavúk

(12 June 2008)

Fine wheel-made (or handmade) burnished grey wares keep occurring in and around the Aegean area throughout the second millennium, but also in the preceding third and in the following first millennium B.C. What may (or may not) be just a coincidence, has often been interpreted as evidence for something: movement of people, development of culture, chronological cross-links. Whereas in some cases it is clear that grey and grey is not always the same, there are other instances, which have kept archaeological discourse busy for well over a century now. This contribution intends to present a kind of entrée into the study of Aegean and Anatolian grey wares, on the background of the history of research, with an open eye also to the neighbouring regions, such as Bulgaria, Georgia and the Levant. Grey wares have received only a few monothematic studies and were mostly dealt with site by site, along with other types of pottery.

Aegeo-Balkan Prehistory