LH IIIB PYLOS: SMALL FINDS AND LARGER ISSUES

Susanne Hofstra

The Late Bronze Age center of Pylos on the Ano Englianos ridge in southwestern Messenia provides an excellent laboratory for the study of texts, artifacts, architecture and decorative program in conjunction. A reexamination of the small finds from the original excavations by Carl Blegen provides the basis for setting the objects of bronze, ivory, bone and stone in their context, and allows these materials to be more successfully evaluated as evidence for production, consumption, and use of space in the palace buildings. These objects also provide new means for assessing the importance of the upper story of the Main Building and its relationship to ground floor areas. Distinct deposits of ivory and bronze can now be isolated as having fallen from the upper floor. These, along with known motifs from the frescoes, reveal the high status of the upper floor and its possible special functions in regard to the use of the building by different groups in palace society. On the ground floor, the space used for storage of commodities increased over the course of the LH IIIB period until it began to encroach upon rooms formerly designed for human-centered activity. The areas between the megaron and main propylon served as places for the public and elite to interact, with the intended use of the spaces reinforced by a decorative program emphasizing communal feasting and symbols of elite power. The upper floor, on the other hand, held large quantities of imported items with high status associations and as well, it was decorated with scenes, such as the hunting of large wild animals, linked to elite social and possibly religious ideology.

The Northeastern Building appears to be an additional space for commodity storage, serving also as a repair and work facility also closely connected to elite concerns and the immediate needs of the palace complex. There is little evidence to support its significance as a major industrial and economic contributor in the greater sphere of the Pylian polity. Its placement on the acropolis with the rest of the palace complex, topographically dominating over, and isolated from, the surrounding settlement, reinforces its relatively restricted palatial status. The palace complex at the end of the LH IIIB period used such symbolic barriers in architecture and space as well as by control of specific iconographic motifs and material goods to emphasize its supreme placement at the head of the Messenian polity.