ABSTRACT
It is perhaps because the material evidence for craft production in the Mycenaean period is relatively abundant, especially within the context of palatial workshops in Late Helladic IIIB, that scholarly focus on Mycenaean craft production has centred on the manufacture of material objects, especially those that the Western tradition holds as ‘the arts’. An overview of Sinclair Hood’s (1978) informative The Arts in Prehistoric Greece indicates the variety of methods used to study craft production. Such research has either centred on the fabrications themselves, including wall painting, ceramics production and decoration, and the creation of small objets d’art such as seal-stones, furniture inlays, jewellery, bronzes and figurines, or on the working of specific raw materials, such as metals, ivory and bone, stone, clay, glass and faience. In the decades since Hood’s publication, further research in the field has uncovered material that informs our knowledge of Bronze Age craft production in a variety of ways, such as the excavation of atelier spaces at Tiryns in diverse areas around the citadel (Brysbaert, in press; Rahmstorf, in press) and the records of crafting in the Linear B tablets from Thebes (Aravantinos et al. 2005; Bernabé and Luján 2008). Simultaneously, a change in research agenda that has foregrounded the understanding of the wider spatial and social contexts of crafts has illuminated how artefacts are produced and appreciated (for example, Dakouri-Hild 2005). Nevertheless, there is still a predominant, if unarticulated, conception that Mycenaean crafting creates material objects (for example, see Crowley 2008; Evely 2010; various papers in Laffineur and Betancourt 1997).
