The Aegean island of Keros, Greece, has long captured the interest of Aegean prehistorians and the general public as it is the alleged findspot of such famous Cycladic figurines as the flutist and harpist held in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens (Koehler Reference Koehler1884: pl. 6), as well as the so-called Keros Hoard (Sotirakopoulou Reference Sotirakopoulou2008). Since the 1960s, the island and its neighbouring islet of Dhaskalio have been investigated by several rescue and systematic programmes of archaeological exploration that have revealed that this now uninhabited set of islands was once a centrally located Cycladic sanctuary. The volume under review, the fourth in the series reporting the results of the Cambridge Keros Project, focuses on the Early Bronze Age pottery (third millennium BC) recovered during the 2007–2008 excavations on Dhaskalio. The settlement on the islet presents great interest not only because of its connection (and, to an extent, complementarity) to the two Special Deposits from Kavos on Keros (with which it was connected by a causeway in antiquity), but also because of its substantial size, on a par with or even larger than some famous contemporaneous sites in the Aegean.

The author, Peggy Sotirakopoulou, is a pottery specialist with an impressive publication record on Early Bronze Age pottery from the Aegean. She builds on her vast experience with Early Cycladic assemblages and presents the material in a comprehensive way that highlights both its strong connections with other locales and its uniqueness. Her approach to the material is mainly typological, supplemented by rigorous quantification of the entirety of the ceramic material recovered from the excavations, which means that her data could be used for sound comparisons with other sites.

The book is structured as follows: after the introduction (Chapter 1), Chapters 2–4 deal with the pottery of the three phases (A, B and C) that Sotirakopoulou has identified based on the excavated deposits, whereas Chapter 5 explores the material recovered from the surface survey. In these chapters, after a brief introduction to each phase, the author describes the material, focusing on the shapes, fabrics and wares, surface treatment and decoration, complementing these summary discussions with an extensive section on typological analysis of the various shapes, in descending order of frequency.

Four chapters deal with more topical matters such as potters’ marks (Chapter 6), chronology (Chapter 7), ceramic regionalism (Chapter 8) and the character and function of the settlement at Dhaskalio (Chapter 9). The book closes with a contribution by Colin Renfrew (Chapter 10), who shares his reflections on the pottery from Dhaskalio, plus a catalogue of inventoried pottery (Chapter 11) and a summary of the volume in Modern Greek. The material is documented in copious black-and-white photographs and drawings, with numerous tables reporting quantitative data. Moreover, the volume comes with a CD that contains colour photographs of the assemblage. The latter is a welcome feature for pottery specialists, and one that I cannot praise enough. The one change I would have liked is for it to have been organised similarly to the book so that the reader could search for items more efficiently (even though not all the photographs are referred to in the printed text, as this CD features many additional artefact photographs).

The pottery dates the establishment of the site to an earlier phase of the Early Cycladic II period, or the Keros-Syros culture (Phase A). The site continues into the next phase, B, without interruption, an assertion that is supported not only stratigraphically, but also from the continuity of shapes. The phases are further differentiated by the changes in the relative frequencies of the Phase A shapes during Phase B, and the introduction of a few new shapes that are characteristic types of the Kastri assemblage, placing Phase B chronologically at the end of the Early Cycladic II period. Finally, the transition into the last phase of the settlement, Phase C, is characterised by the preponderance of Kastri types that continue from the previous phase and are enriched with new morphological and typological characteristics. One of the strengths of the book is the detailed discussion of Phase C, which is directly relevant to the decades-long discussion on the validity of the so-called Early Cycladic III gap, pioneered by Jeremy Rutter (Reference Rutter1983, Reference Rutter, MacGillivray and Barber1984). Sotirakopoulou posits that Phase C at Dhaskalio is “shown by its contextual associations to be equivalent to the whole span of the Early Cycladic III period, as evidenced at Phylakopi phases I-ii and I-iii on Melos and in ‘closed’ contexts with similar material on Thera and on Amorgos” (p. 357), suggesting that the pottery of Dhaskalio essentially ‘closes’ the gap.

The contribution of this volume does not end with matters of chronology. Dhaskalio is in itself an interesting piece in the bigger Keros picture. The Dhaskalio assemblages have a more ‘domestic’ quality, which is markedly different from the cultic character of the deposits from Kavos on Keros that have been interpreted as evidence of periodic cult activities. Further, the make-up of the Dhaskalio assemblage shows rather ‘abnormal’ emphases that change over time. In Phase A, the numerous baking pans/hearths and cooking pots are the largest categories of vessels, a trend that is in contrast with the relative rarity of vessels connected to the consumption of food and drink, whereas in Phases B and C, the emphasis is on the transport and storage of commodities for future use, rather than on food preparation. Moreover, none of the pottery seems to have been manufactured on the island, but was instead imported primarily from the islands of the so-called ‘Keros triangle’, with smaller quantities from Melos and Thera, and some from areas of Mainland Greece or the Saronic Gulf (albeit each phase presents some variability in regard to the provenance of pots). This indicates that the site accommodated visitors who were drawn to the islet because of the periodic rituals at Kavos, even though the author does not dismiss the possibility of a small number of permanent inhabitants.

All in all, Sotirakopoulou's book succeeds in presenting in satisfying detail the deposits of this very important site, which will undoubtedly feature in future disciplinary discussions about the latter part of the Early Bronze Age Aegean.