Charles Griebel, University of Texas at Austin
Michael C. Nelson, University of Toronto
The Palace of Nestor stood on the Englianos ridge in the southwestern Peloponnesos until a devastating fire destroyed the half-timber and ashlar superstructure sometime in the Late Helladic IIIB period. According to Carl Blegen, the excavator, the site was never again re-occupied. However, Dark Age pottery not only occurred frequently in surface finds, but it also appeared consistently in a stratum described as quote “black and greasy and containing many small stones” unquote. Blegen concluded that the intrusive black greasy stratum resulted from a late Geometric olive pressing industry. The olive oil residues, he believed, saturated the earth, thus resulting in its greasy texture.
Also in this same stratum came frequent finds of numerous pieces of iron, some quite large, surely a signal for a date no earlier than the Iron Age. Our examination of this stratum and its related architecture leads to an unshakable conclusion that an extensive Dark Age occupation at the palace existed.
As a part of the University of Minnesota’s Archaeological Researches at Pylos, in 1990, we began a thorough study of the published material, the excavation notebooks, the corpus of photographs, and the miscellany of working manuscripts and drawings from the Blegen excavations. Our study coincided with Mervin Popham’s re-assessment of Blegen’s publications of the Dark Age pottery. In a 1991 article, Popham sites an earlier date for the destruction of the Palace, but, more importantly, reasons an early Iron Age occupation at Ano Englianos. Popham concentrates on the ceramic evidence. In this paper, we present the architectural and stratigraphical reason for a Dark Age settlement at Pylos. We draw much of the new evidence from our work at Pylos this past summer.
Blegen provides an admirably complete narrative description of the stratigraphy of the Palace proper; his interest, however, declined sharply when it came to the outlying architectural remains and, moreover, he did not illustrate his stratigraphy by drawings. His method makes it difficult to recover those stratigraphic levels that may have covered areas broader than a single room. To this end we have prepared a plan reconstructing the locations of Blegen’s excavation trenches and another illustrating his stratigraphic sequences. There emerge basically three stratigraphic sequences. The third sequence was the most commonly found. From top to bottom, there is plowed earth above a layer of debris, and then a stratum of burnt material. This last layer overlaid much of the palace floor. In some rooms, however, the burnt layer was absent. The second, or debris stratum, contained remains of destroyed walls, plaster and spots of carbonized wood. This was also the layer that contained the bulk of the recovered artifacts of late Mycenaean date.
The first and second stratigraphic sequences point to Dark Age activity at Pylos and therefore concern us the most here. The second of the three sequences consists of four strata: plowed earth at the top, followed by a black oily earth. Next comes a layer of grey ashy earth with small stones. The debris stratum of this sequence, the black oily earth, consistently yielded pottery and artifacts dating to the Dark Age.
The second sequence typifies the broad area flanking the northeast side of the palace in rooms 39 through 42, 47, 91 92 and 102 and especially the sprawling walls within the area designated as 103. From both the black oily and gray ashy strata came four complete Dark Age vessels along with six pieces of iron implements including four nails, one of which measures over 16 centimeters in length, a ring with a hook attached, and a flat piece of iron with a concave edge. Popham, perhaps correctly, suggests these nails are spits.
The first of the three basic stratigraphic sequences occurs in the agglomerated rooms 83 to 86, shown here in red, and in the cluster of units 63, 88, 89 and 90 at the opposite or southwest side of the Palace. The sequence consists of plowed earth above the tell-tale black oily layer. Here is a slide from Blegen’s publication which shows the black oily stratum above Court 88. Sometimes a yellow clay-like stratum came below the black oily as in courts 63 and 88. Here, the yellow layer substitutes for the debris stratum common to the other sequences.
The first sequence held little in the way of Mycenaean artifacts while containing some fragments of Late Geometric glazed ware. The agglomerated rooms 83-86 at the northwest did yield Geometric pottery at the upper level, but the stratigraphy was sufficiently disturbed to prompt Blegen to ignore the material. Nonetheless, an unpublished fragment of a terracotta spit holder, noted in the excavation journal, accords well with fragments of spits found elsewhere at the site.
Important to our assessment of the Geometric occupation is the soil at Pylos that Blegen came upon in nearly 25 percent of the area of the palace. Furthermore, this same stratum was found rather extensively in the area to the northeast of the Northeast Workshop and along the fringes of the acropolis.
The mineral, sedimentary and pedological composition of the black oily soil awaits analysis at the Soil Science and Archaeometry Laboratories at the University of Minnesota. Until the results are available, we cannot disclaim Blegen’s conclusions that the color and texture were due to spills of olive oil, yet we suspect that the black and greasy deposit is not a result of degenerated organic matter but rather represents a high clay content such as Professor Julie Stein found for a comparable Dark Age matrix at nearby Nichoria.
This past summer’s work at the site went a long way towards clarifying the domestic architectural activity that extended the palace and site in the Geometric period. Dwellings of the Dark Age settlement at Pylos take three different forms of construction. The first consists of straightforward reoccupation of certain parts of the Palace, namely rooms 4, 6, 39, 40 plus those marked in red on this plan.
The second form of house unit was created by construction of partitions connecting standing walls. Sometimes these walls cross earlier courtyards such as what happened with the transverse walls of units 89/90. Thus the twin rooms subdivided the original court into areas 88 and 63. In the partition type of construction, the walls contain fragments of blocks re-used from the Palace and, it is important to note, these are built on top of a layer of earth which separates the wall base from the Mycenaean occupation level.
The third form of house construction consists of irregular stretches of humbly built walls as seen in the agglomeration of rooms 83 to 86 at the northwest. Sometimes these dwellings borrow earlier walls for re-use as a foundation of socle course. Walls Z10, Z15, Z16, Z18, Z19 and Z20, shown in pink on this plan, are examples of this type of construction. Before coming to these walls, it is necessary to clarify a relative chronology for the profusions of walls filling Area 103 surrounding the Wine Magazine.
As mentioned earlier, Blegen appears to have had little interest in the maze of pre-palatial walls in Area 103, though he does note briefly their presence: quote “Too little has survived of these houses antedating the Wine Magazine to give an adequate idea of the general plan and character of the pre- palatial settlement in this quarter or to fix its date exactly” unquote. He was even less concerned with evidence for a possible post-palatial occupation of the palace.
David French in 1958 dug a sondage through the vestibule of the wine magazine to find a massive wall of Middle Helladic date. The position is marked in orange on the plan and here is a slide of the wall after cleaning this summer. The next phase, in blue on the plan, consists of a pair of column bases, set on an axis running at 45 degrees to the general alignment of later walls. A plaster floor, decorated with geometric patterns and stripes in blue and white, takes the same orientation as the column bases and must be considered as a part of the same room or hall. This is followed by walls, here marked in green, which cut through this decorated plaster floor. In turn, the foundations for the Wine Magazine, in orange, cut through the green-period building. The sealings found in the Wine Magazine date this construction to the period of the palace, making the green walls pre-palatial in date.
The walls marked in pink either sit directly on top of the pre-palatial and palatial levels or are separated from the previous levels by a deposit of earth, approximately 10 to 20 cm. thick. For instance, the bottom of wall Z20 rests on the top of wall Z21. In another instance, wall Z15 rests on 15-20 cm. of earth accumulated above the pre-palatial wall Z14 and the plaster floor. The separation can be seen in this elevation.
A Dark Age date for the use of walls, colored pink, comes from unpublished finds of iron blades and nails coming from the north and south extremities of the northeast area of the settlement.
We now return to the opposite side of the palace and the twin rooms which, according to Blegen, served as an olive press. Blegen recognized two of the three building phases in Rooms 89 and 90, but did not reconcile this fact with the olive press function. In all probability, these rooms comprise a modest house which was expanded and remodeled in the Geometric period.
Room 89, a 5-meter square house, appears to have been the first construction: blocks taken from the palace were reused in the northwest, northeast and southeast walls, with a stretch of palace wall used for the fourth side of the room. The entrance was likely in the north wall. Later, Room 90 doubled the size of the house by extending the northwest and southeast walls to the flank wall of the palace.
In a remodeling of the combined house 89 through 90, the door which originally opened into Room 90 from Room 89 was blocked, the dividing wall demolished, a flagged floor of rough, flat stones laid in Room 90, and a new door opened at the southeast corner, as indicated by a threshold block. What Blegen interpreted as a ‘firebox’ must have been a simple domestic hearth.
As elsewhere, the addition of the two cross-walls is not flush with the Mycenaean pavement, but, instead, is seated on a layer of earth and only crudely abuts the earlier anta wall or ashlar stones. This slide shows an uprighted dress block from the Palace with its top bearing a dowel hole turned to one side.
The multiple building phases of these structures speak in favor of there being a domestic settlement and against Blegen’s identification of a building dedicated to pressing olives. All the reconstructed Dark Age vessels, most of which appear in this slide, are domestic wares, no remains of large jars for storage or transport of olive oil are reported from the later period.
Throughout this paper we have spoken of a date only in the vaguest of terms: Dark Age or Geometric. A chronology for this post-palatial settlement at Pylos may be clarified by future restudy of retained pottery and by continued investigations at the site as suggested by Popham. At this moment, there appears to be ceramic evidence for Late Helladic IIIC and a late Geometric occupation stemming from the prevalence of that consistent 10-20 cm. deposit of earth above the Mycenaean occupation levels and the evidence of the ruined but probably still standing palace walls and the subsequent resettlement.
Dark Age people occupied the Englianos ridge, in some areas clearing away the Mycenaean remains and utilizing the preserved floors and walls. In other areas, the squatters built their houses above the Mycenaean destruction. In conclusion, we stress, therefore, that Pylos must be viewed as a major domestic site in the enigmatic dark age of this part of Greece.
© 1992 Charles Griebel and Michael C. Nelson