The Chrysokamino Metallurgy Workshop and its Territory (review)

This volume constitutes the final publication of the excavation of a metallurgical workshop, the topographic survey of its immediate territory, and the scientific analyses of its finds. This multi-disciplinary project, conducted under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, took place from 1995 to 1997, with study seasons in 1998 and 1999. The director, Philip Betancourt, and the many contributing authors, should be commended for the rapidity and high quality of their publications, which include not only the volume under review but a number of article-length studies.

The workshop at Chrysokamino is located on a cliff above the Gulf of Mirabello, roughly halfway between the sites of Gournia and Mochlos. The activity of the workshop, which was exclusively focused on smelting (the extraction of copper from metal ores), spans over a millennium, from the Final Neolithic (ca. 4000–3200 BC) to the end of the Prepalatial period (EM III–MM IA, ca. 2300–1900 BC). The site itself consists of an oval-shaped slag heap on a coastal headland. Within the slag heap were found fragments of perforated cylindrical furnace chimneys, pot bellows, tuyères, and other finds; the only architecture here was a small, temporary apsidal structure with postholes and three successive floors dating to EM III–MM IA. The metallurgical installation was the primary focus of the project, but in recognition of the fact that many important questions could not be answered simply through excavation of the workshop itself, a variety of other studies took place. A small Minoan farmstead located some 600 m to the southeast was excavated and the region surrounding these sites was intensively examined by a topographical survey, supplementing the archaeological survey conducted here in 1988–1990 by Donald Haggis (Kavousi I: The Archaeological Survey of the Kavousi Region [Philadelphia 2005]). Limited excavations were also made to determine the date of a terrace wall and a man-made cave located about 130 m north of the farmstead. Unfortunately, most of the data collected by these additional studies do not overlap with the period of metallurgical activity. The majority of the sites from the survey are Byzantine or later, as are the excavated terrace wall and man-made cave. In the excavation of the Minoan farmstead, pottery from the Final Neolithic, EM and MM periods was found, but the architectural remains date to the Late Bronze Age (LM IB– LM IIIA).

An impressive battery of scientific tests conducted by labs in the US, the UK and Greece are presented as appendices written by specialists. These tests include petrographic and X-ray diffraction analyses of the slags and furnace chimneys, SEM/EDAX analysis of the prills and slag, lead isotope analysis of the slags, PIXE analysis of the prills to determine arsenic content, wavelength dispersive spectrometry to determine the elemental composition of slags, and organic residue analysis of pottery sherds. As one might expect, some of the explanations of the scientific testing are more comprehensible to the uninitiated than others; particularly clear are the lead isotope analyses by Stos and Gale (Appendix C) and the reconstruction of the smelting process by Bassiakos and Catapotis (Appendix F). These studies show, among other things, that the Chrysokamino workshop received ores from a variety of sources in the Aegean, including Attica and the Cyclades, and that the smelting operations were fairly efficient and sophisticated (see too T.O. Pryce et al., "'De Caerimoniae.' Technological choices in copper-smelting furnace design at early Bronze Age Chrysokamino, Crete," Archaeometry 49[2007] 543–557; M. Catapotis and Y. Bassiakos, "Copper smelting at the Early Minoan site of Chrysokamino on Crete," in P.M. Day and R.C.P. Doonan, eds., Metallurgy in the Early Bronze Age Aegean [Sheffield 2007] 68–83).

While the editing and overall quality of the volume are excellent, its organization is sometimes difficult. For example, we are not told the date of the...