Subminoan: A Neglected Phase of the Cretan Sottery Sequence

"The phase known as 'Submycenaean', attested principally in Attica and the Argils, is simply the last stage of this final sub-phase of the LH IIIC period (Rutter 2000)". Thus Jerry Rutter, the most influential scholar of Aegean Bronze Age pottery, ends the section on the pottery of Late Helladic IIIC Late in his on-line university course dealing with Aegean archaeology. He thereby acknowledges, after years of skepticism, the existence on the Greek Mainland of a brief period in the 11th century BC in which ceramic production, as distinct from that of LH IIIC Late, can be defined as Submycenaean. In spite of apparent idiosyncracy and marked regionalism that characterize it, Cretan ceramic production form the end of the Bronze Age, too, can be subdivided into two phases, Subminoan I and Subminoan II, coinciding respectively with the LHIIIC Late and the Sumycenaean periods. The aim of this paper is to identify the deposits on Crete that can be attributed to these phases, to define the typological features of the relative ceramic productions, and, where possible, to highlight connections with the coeval production of mainland Greece.