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Abstracts Todd Whitelaw Institute of Archaeology, UCL All archaeological records require contextualisation for interpretation, both in terms of the past culture, but also in terms of our assumptions. Working at the interface between material culture and texts provides an opportunity for archaeologists, as analysts, to learn more about each, by playing the different sources, and the assumptions we make in their interpretation, off against each other. The Linear B archives of the Mycenaean palaces document palatial interest in specific segments of the economy, which it is increasingly argued reflect not so much preservation bias, but the structure of the administrative system. In contrast, archaeological evidence documents that the palaces were involved in acquiring and consuming a wide range of products which rarely figure in the accounts. Ceramics are a key example, since, while many thousands of vessels were recovered from the destruction deposits of the palace at Pylos, there are only a handful of references to ceramic vessels in the complete Linear B corpus. The objective of this paper is to try to document, through the archaeological material, the scale of ceramic production in the kingdom of Pylos, and the involvement of the palace in ceramic consumption, distribution, and the organisation of production. This provides a basis on which to understand the lack of centralised palatial administrative interest or documentation of ceramics, and contributes to the definition of the Mycenaean palatial economy. | Back to Abstracts | Back to the Timetable | |