Anyone who works in the field of Classical studies should have heard of Knossos and the Minoan civilisation, and a little reading or just a visit to Crete could introduce them to many other major Minoan centres. But Kommos, on the coast south-west of Phaistos and Ayia Triada, is not a name likely to be familiar. It was identified by Evans as a ‘harbour town’ (cf. J.D.S. Pendlebury, The Archaeology of Crete. An introduction [1939], p. 12), but only began to be excavated in 1976 by J.W. and M.C. Shaw, with the support of the University of Toronto. The first volumes, concerning the pottery sequence, were published in 1990 (Volume 2, on the pre-Late Minoan pottery, reviewed in CR 42 [1992], 135–7) and 1992 (Volume 3, on the Late Minoan pottery). Volume 1, covering the region, ecology, excavated houses and associated industries, appeared in two parts in 1995 (reviewed in CR 46 [1996], 335–6) and 1996 (reviewed in CR 48 [1998], 134–5), while Volumes 4 (on the Greek Sanctuary) and 5 (on the monumental buildings of the Southern Area) were published in 2000 and 2006. The effort that went into producing these delayed the publication of House X, whose excavation was mainly conducted between 1984 and 1994. Its size and complexity, and the richness of the pottery deposits in and around it, made it necessary to divide the publication into two parts, the first concerned with the building's architecture and history and the range of finds from it, the second solely with the pottery.
Kommos is not an easy site to categorise. The quantities of wind-blown sand that covered the remains and the destruction caused by the sea in its western parts have made excavation and understanding the layout of the site particularly difficult. It probably began as a fishing village in the Final Neolithic, which in the First Palace Period (earlier second millennium bc; all dates henceforth are bc) was expanded into something more substantial – but it seems more like an extended strip of occupation along a hilly slope facing the sea than a nucleated township. In fact, the most important structures discovered, which have been labelled the Civic Centre, lay not in the centre of the settled area but in the area at the south end of the slope, connected to parts further north by roads but also separated from them in the Late Minoan (LM) period by the east–west Road 17. This ran along the north side of the monumental Building T complex, going towards the sea in the west and, as Road 33, to an unclear destination in the east. House X stood on the north-west side of the crossroads formed by the juncture of Road 17 with Road 32/34 coming down from the north, which became slab-paved at this point as it approached its apparent destination, one of the few entrances into the Building T complex. House X was thus close to Building T and may well have had some kind of functional relationship with it, but Building T is itself rather enigmatic and difficult to interpret, though clearly a public building of considerable importance in its first stage of use. It replaced Building AA, which was also large and probably public; little is known about this, but its existence indicates that Kommos had become a centre of importance by the end of the First Palace Period. The most likely interpretation is that, as more clearly in the LM period, Kommos was a port, serving the greater centres of the Mesara like Phaistos and Ayia Triada; there were no special harbour installations, but there is a good stretch of beach on which smaller ships could be drawn up, and an offshore reef mitigates the strength of the waves in this area.
Both Building T and House X were part of a major rebuilding programme at Kommos in the early Second Palace Period (seventeenth century), following a disaster, perhaps an earthquake, that seems to have destroyed much of the town. There is disagreement between Parts 1 and 2 on the phase in which House X was built, stated to be in the earlier part of LM IA in Part 1 (p. 2), but perhaps not before LM IA Advanced in Part 2 (p. 124); since dating must depend on the assessment of the pottery evidence, the later view should be preferred. There seems to have been a gap in occupation in LM IB Early (Part 2, p. 129), but it was reoccupied with considerable internal rearrangement in LM IB Late and continued in occupation, with further rearrangements and a progressive limiting of the parts in use, until a structural collapse in LM IIIA2 Early (second quarter of the fourteenth century). It was clearly a special building, with two storeys, and, unlike all other buildings excavated at Kommos except Building T, it produced evidence of wall-frescoes in several rooms. The best-preserved shows tall lily plants on rock, and there is other evidence of plant-related themes and a spiral pattern (colour reconstructions are offered), but no trace of a figured scene (admittedly, these are very rare in Crete outside Knossos).
To call House X a ‘mansion’, however, is to use too grand a term, in the reviewer's opinion; ‘large town house’ might define it better. It is the largest of the Kommos houses (though dwarfed by the public buildings), but overall it is not especially impressive. There is little evidence for the use of slab or plaster floors or ashlar masonry (abundantly represented in the architecture of Building T), and it is thought closest to the House 2 form in J. McEnroe's typology (‘A typology of Minoan Neopalatial houses’, AJA 86 [1982], 3–19). It had an outer facade of small, regularly coursed rectangular blocks (interior walls were also of stone, but much more irregular and not bonded to the facade), a likely portico with two pillars opening onto Road 32/34, and a probable open terrace in the upper storey on the south, overlooking Road 17. It stood above the level of these roads, and like other rebuilt houses of this phase at Kommos was free-standing, in empty space; it remains unclear whether it had neighbours along the roads that border it in any direction. Some parts had to remain uninvestigated because they were under much later Archaic structures, and excavation did not reach the earliest levels of occupation in some rooms, but in general the house's history is clear, and every stage is documented by considerable deposits.
The architecture and stratigraphy are published in detail in Part 1, Chapter 1, in which accounts are given of the ‘spaces’ into which the building is divided, numbered X1–16, with discussion of their history and possible function, ending with a brief coverage of its periphery. Chapter 2, on the frescoes, deals with the evidence from each space separately in a similar way, but with a concluding overview. Chapter 3 covers miscellaneous finds, including some items from the periphery and from preceding Middle Minoan deposits. Chapter 4 covers the faunal remains, which include a significant percentage of marine molluscs as well as the common range of terrestrial animals; it has important preliminary and concluding general sections, but centres on descriptions of the material found with the sequence of pottery deposits identified in each of the ‘spaces’, supplemented by a mass of tables at the end of the book giving more detail. Finally, in Chapter 5, there is a summary and general perspective, pulling everything together. In addition to the tables covering faunal remains, there are a few covering the distribution of evidence for weaving activity, implements and tools, and cooking vessels, and abundant illustrations.
In general there is nothing very remarkable about the house's contents, which apart from the pottery and fresco fragments consist of a lot of stone implements and other items, including vessel-fragments, beads and a few sealstones, some items of metal, bone and shell, and some of clay, mostly loomweights but including a few small figurines, none in a very significant context. Some of the more interesting, like a stone jeweller's mould for earring types, come from mixed or earlier deposits. But the house gives a good general impression of life at Kommos over most of the LM period, and on one point in particular its evidence is potentially significant historically. Although there were major changes in the building's arrangement in LM II and later, the material offers no support for any notion of ‘Mycenaean’ newcomers in that phase taking over the house. Some pottery innovations that have mainland roots appeared sporadically, as in Kommos generally (see further below), but House X seems to continue ‘Minoan’ traditions.
Some features of the faunal evidence are rather striking and may be thought particularly local, the significant part played in the diet by marine resources, especially limpets and other shellfish, together with a liking for shell ornaments, particularly cockle necklaces, and the extreme rarity of cattle remains (a word of warning here: the term ‘bovid’ is used to cover all hollow-horned mammals, a usage that may be unfamiliar, as it was to the reviewer). Of considerable interest is the conversion of what was originally an internal passageway into a shrine (X7). This contained a series of floors, largely of compacted soil, that represent successive stages in its use from LM II to IIIA2; on these floors were found various sets of mostly simple vases like conical cups and braziers, which were probably used in ritual, along with other items. On the final floor there was a low stone ‘table’ on which items including pottery and cockle shells, some strung as necklaces, were arranged; a triton shell was also found on a slab in the floor and a much older (LM I) sealstone showing a ‘bird-woman’ image, surely of some special significance, was found in the room's fill. The absence of figurines of any kind underlines the differences from the considerable evidence for ‘house shrines’ of LM II–III date found at other Minoan sites.
Undoubtedly, the most important material from in and around House X is the pottery, covered in great detail in Part 2. The House X deposits supplement the evidence from other houses, to produce a general LM sequence for Kommos that is superior to those of Phaistos and Ayia Triada and rivals that of Knossos for much of the LM period. After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 offers a brief account of each stratigraphically defined deposit in the series of ‘spaces’ (which are taken in numerical order, unlike in Part 1), with catalogue entries for selected pieces and tables summarising statistical evidence. A unified numbering system for catalogue entries and illustrations makes it easy to find every piece referred to in the discussion. Chapter 3 offers ‘perspectives by period’, in each case containing discussion of the nature of the deposits and possible relevance to the space's function, and a section on what new information is contributed by the evidence. Chapter 4 is a wide-ranging chapter of conclusions, and there is a final appendix containing much extra statistical data. As in Vol. 3, every class of pottery is given equal consideration, with the result that the ubiquitous conical cup takes pride of place as the leading open shape in the LM I and II phases and receives its own table of statistics. The LM II phase, for which Kommos provides the only unmixed deposits outside Knossos, is discussed in particular detail, and so too is LM IIIA1, because of the abundance and relative purity of the House X deposits.
This is not the place for extensive comment on details, but it is important to note that analysis of Kommos pottery has now established not only three phases of LM IA, but also three of LM IB, with LM IB Final equivalent to what was defined in Vol. 3 as early LM II (for a justification of this new definition see Part 2, pp. 140 and 208, n. 19). The need to allow reasonable amounts of time for all these subdivisions suggests that LM IB may need to be imagined as a longer phase than the 50 years that have been traditionally allotted in absolute chronologies of the Aegean Bronze Age (as has already happened with LM IA, in fact). The account of the LM I phases emphasises how south central Crete did not faithfully follow Knossian developments in these phases but maintained local traditions. This was to change in LM II, when Knossian influence became strongly marked, as it continued to be in LM IIIA1; yet the most striking LM II innovation, the two-handled goblet or kylix, generally seen as deriving from the mainland tradition established in pre-Mycenaean times, was never very popular at Kommos. A type of cooking jug that also has a long mainland ancestry appeared, at Kommos as at Knossos, and other changes such as the introduction of a new type of lamp can be identified, but these developments seem to be gradual, not sudden.
The account of the House X pottery does not merely support, amplify and revise the picture of the local LM sequence provided in Vol. 3. It includes a large amount of extra evidence for the connections that Kommos had with other areas of Crete and the Aegean, western Anatolia, Cyprus, the Syro-Palestinian coast and Egypt, although it adds nothing to the already strong evidence for the Italian, particularly Sardinian, connection that peaked in LM IIIB. Interestingly, this imported material only begins to be common in House X in the post-LM I phases, and it underlines the fact that there is more imported material at Kommos than anywhere else in Crete. This surely supports the long-standing view that Kommos’ primary function was as a port, which grew into a major node in maritime exchange within the Mediterranean in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries – even after the collapse of the unitary Knossos state – until it went into abrupt decline late in the thirteenth century and was largely abandoned. It would be too much to expect that the scanty deposits of this stage from above House X could give any clue to a reason for this, but, as is clearly brought out in this exemplary pair of volumes, House X makes an important contribution to the data that must be considered when discussing the developments within Crete over the Late Bronze Age.
