Kommos, An Excavation on the South Coast of Crete ed. by Joseph W. Shaw and Maria C. Shaw (review)

164 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 he seems not to understand that many disempowered people cannot afford it.' This constitutes a curiously elitist claim in its own right! The section on women's autobiography tackles very interesting considerations : how one deals with writings which appear to be textually naIve but which deal with socially important topics such as violence, racism, and abuse. However, the final plea is to respond to the person of the writer rather than to deal with the complications of the text. The third section is described as offering readings of non-canonical writings, and then includes figures such as Kroetsch, Ondaa~e, Atwood, and Munro. Once again there is an idiolect operating here which is difficult to decode. Situated against the overarching state ideology are notions of subversive writings and readings designed to establish groups or communities who question or 'embarrass' the state ideology by revealing its fractures. This is worthy but scarcely new, although the claims made for print culture carry a whiff of anachronistic nostalgia. Would that its influence were indeed quite so powerful! (SNEJA GUNEW) Joseph W. Shaw and Maria C. Shaw, editors. Kommos, An Excavation on the South Coast of Crete Volume 1: The Kommos Region and Houses of the Minoan Town. Part 2: The Minoan Hilltop and Hillside Houses. Princeton University Press. 754, illus (473 halftone, 176line)- us $150.00 Nearly a hundred years have gone by since Arthur Evans revealed to an amazed wodd the riches of the great Minoan palace of Knossos and what has come to be regarded as the first European civilization. Evans had earlier explored much of Crete, however, and a site that he signalled as worthy of notice was a deserted area of sandy beach near the palace at Phaistos at the western end of the great Mesara plain insouthern Crete. Facing the Libyan sea, the area seemed suitable as a harbour town for the local centre of government. In 1976 with large-scale funding from the SSHRCC and other donors, Maria and Joseph Shaw of the University of Toronto and a group of collaborators from Canada, the United States~ and Britain began a longterm exploration of the site~ a project that continues today. This volume is the fourth to appear of the final publication of the first phase of the campaign, which looks likely to stretch into the next millennium. One of Canada's largest archaeological projects overseas, Kommos has provided opportunities for an international team ofspecialists to examine in great detail the life, architecture, and environs of a small but apparently important village (the authors estimate the population at three to four hundred people) in the second millennium Be. An unexpected discovery that will be presented in a future volume was a remarkable HUMANITIES 165 sanctuary built over the southern part of the site that seems to have continued from later sub-Minoantimes down into the early Roman empire. Volume 2, part 2, however deals with the modest domestic architecture on the site's hilltop and hillside. A highly technical study with an abundance ofplans and illustrations, this work presents to a specialist reader a detailed conspectus of the buildings and their contents. Much of the latter is also being dealt with in a series of separately published individual specialized studies, something inevitable with any large excavation. Most of the book is devoted to a detailed presentation of the individual houses and the most significant of.their contents. Various collaborators, notably Lucia Nixon,John McEnroe, andJames Wright, figure prominently here in discussing the domestic architecture recovered at the site, while an assemblage of seven authors presents the miscellaneous finds - loom weights, jewellery, lead, stone and terracotta objects, etc - that add detail to our knowledge of the lives ofthe lnhabitants. The Shaws devote the final fifty-six pages, however, to an attempt to present town arrangement and domestic architecture as well as domestic economy and transitions in the Middle and Late Minoanperiods (roughly the sixteenth to twelfth centuries BC). These sections helpfully assemble a picture of life in a Minoan town and will be useful for students of urban history who may be daunted by the 'hard core' archaeology ofthe earlier chapters. Rebuilding after earthquakes...