#eleutherna

Potterymaking in ancient Greece was a male-dominated profession, but about 3000 years ago, one woman from the island of Crete broke the mold to become the only known female master ceramicist in antiquity. The finding, based on a lengthy biomechanical analysis of her skeletal remains, sheds light on the elevated roles played by women in at least some parts of the classical world.

The master potter, who lived to be about 45 or 50, was buried in the city of Eleutherna on the slopes of Mount Ida, the legendary birthplace of Zeus. Ornate pottery in nearby graves suggests she lived between 900 B.C.E. and 650 B.C.E., after the fall of the Minoan and Mycenean civilizations (depicted above) and toward the end of the so-called Greek Dark Ages.

Back in 2009, archaeologists at Eleutherna—an ancient city-state located on the Greek island of Crete—discovered a woman’s skeleton that showed unusual signs of wear. As Michael Price writes for Science magazine, in comparison to the other females at the site, the muscles on the right side of her body were notably developed, while the cartilage on her knee and hip joints was worn away, leaving the bones smooth and ivory-like.

Initial analysis of the woman’s remains, as well as the pottery found in similar graves at the Orthi Petra burial site, indicated that the approximately 45 to 50 year old lived between 900 B.C.. and 650 B.C. By this point in Crete’s history, the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations—rivals best known for the labyrinthine palace complexes that inspired the classic Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur and the gold mask of Agamemnon, respectively—had long since collapsed, ushering the region into a tumultuous period later dubbed the Greek Dark Ages.

New questions arise about a peculiar 2,800-year-old burial on Crete

Over the past quarter century, excavations at the Iron Age necropolis of Orthi Petra at Eleutherna on Crete, under the direction of Greek archaeologist Nicholas Stampolidis, a professor at the University of Crete, have yielded fantastic finds. In the 1990s, for instance, the cremated remains of 141 aristocratic men—who likely fell in battle abroad and were honored with burials fit for Homeric war heroes—famously came to light. But the latest discoveries, a stone’s throw from the warriors’ collective tomb, have most captivated me because they radically alter our understanding of the role of women, once thought to be “inferior” to men, in the so-called “Dark Ages” of Greece. Successfully evading the archaeologists’ trowels until 2007, a dozen female individuals are now known to represent an incredibly wealthy and powerful female bloodline, the first and only-known discovery to date of its kind in Greece. Read more.