Emilia Oddo

Knossos: The House of the Frescoes British School at Athens, 2022

This volume presents a complete study of the architecture and finds from the House of the Frescoes at Knossos, a Neopalatial building uncovered by Sir Arthur Evans and Duncan Mackenzie in 1923 and 1926. Located in a prominent position, a few meters south of the Royal Road and close to both the Theatral Area and the north-west corner of the Palace, the House of the Frescoes owes its name to the large deposit of painted plaster discovered within its ruins.

Reinvestigation of the House took place in 2016-2019 and included: on-site cleaning of the remains in 2018; detailed analysis of the pottery and other finds; and study of archival material from the original excavations (excerpts presented in this volume). The results offer new insights into the architecture and finds’ contexts, as well as fresh perspectives on the building’s occupation, purpose and abandonment. They suggest that the House of the Frescoes was a non-residential building, and instead had a public role with strong ritual connotations. Its memory survived for a while after its abandonment, as demonstrated by the structured depositions—including the frescoes—found within.

Finally, this analysis highlights the urban context of the House of the Frescoes and its connections with the Royal Road area, where much archaeological work has been carried out after Evans. The emerging picture helps to shed further light on the character of Knossos, pre-eminent centre of Minoan Crete at the height of the Bronze Age.

South by Southeast: The History and Archaeology of Southeast Crete from Myrtos to Kato Zakros Archaeopress, 2022 Co-edited with Konstantinos Chalikias

South by Southeast: The History and Archaeology of Southeast Crete from Myrtos to Kato Zakros publishes the proceedings of the conference of the same name held in Pacheia Ammos (Crete) in July 2017. Its aim is to investigate the settlement patterns, maritime connectivity, and material culture of the southeast of Crete in a diachronic fashion, in an attempt to define it as a region and trace its history. The title South by Southeast, an ironic take on Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest, encapsulates the uncertainty of what exactly the Southeast means and our need to clarify its geographical limits and cultural span. The papers presented focus primarily on the archaeology of the sites along the coastal strip spanning between the Myrtos Valley and Kato Zakros, an area that has time and again produced evidence of interconnection. Indeed one of the most important aspects surfacing from the volume is the evidence for the diachronic existence of the Southeast as a distinct cultural entity. The elements that tied the sites together shifted at times, forcing us to evaluate the concept of region as a flexible one that reflects different ways of defining a community.