Published! Hale and Sterba 2025, and how it helps MITAMBA

It is always exciting when a new article featuring long-awaited results is released into the wild! Earlier this year, Johannes H. Sterba (a MITAMBA collaborator) and I published “From Pottery Provenance to Multiscale Diachronic Connectivity at Middle Bronze Age Mitrou, Greece” in the European Journal of Archaeology, and it is fully open access. Make sure to check out the supplementary materials, including a full sample list as well as macroscopic fabric photos of each.

The work features results stemming from my previous project (RENLORC), but there are things directly relevant to MITAMBA and our work moving forward which are worth a few words.

The big contribution of the paper is the neutron activation analysis results of more than 100 samples from Mitrou in East Lokris - a site which forms a key foundation for our understanding of MBA central Greece (one of MITAMBA's core regions of investigation). Check out the Mitrou Archaeological Project  (co-directed by Aleydis Van de Moortel from the University of Tennessee and Efthymia Karantzali from the Ephororate of Antiquities of Phthiotida and Evrytania) for more details about the site. 

Our paper complements a previous paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports concerned with imported pottery at Mitrou identified through petrographic analysis (Hale 2023). Together, the combined Mitrou dataset is the largest of its kind from MBA central Greece, and will be extremely useful when compared to similar datasets from elsewhere such as Kolonna (see Gauß and Kiriatzi 2011) and Lerna (which was also just published last year! See Spencer and Mommsen 2024; Whitbread, Jones and Spencer 2024; Whitbread, Mommsen and Lindblom 2024).

It reveals much about Mitrou's connectivity in the MBA (but note, the paper does not include samples dated to Late Helladic I. These will be published separately and compared with other Late Helladic I samples taken from other central Greek sites). We attempted to visualize Mitrou's evolving interaction as seen in the dataset, and show how the site was variously connected to other parts of the Aegean world:

From Hale and Sterba 2025, fig. 5.

Clearly, Mitrou was connected to the southern Aegean (especially in the later MBA) via persistent and strong interaction with central Euboea in particular. The strength of the central Euboean representation (and the rarity of local production of fine tablewares) was a big surprise for us, and this will continue to be explored in future work. 

We will explore in more depth as MITAMBA progesses, but for now, it is worth noting some hints of links to the north and east in Mitrou's data. In particular, there is a small but persistent group which can be linked to Magnesia, representing material which likely travelled down past the Gulf of Malis into the northern Euboean Gulf. The paper confirms that this maritime route was active throughout the period, complementing the links macroscopically hypothesized by Joseph Maran in his work at Pefkakia (Maran 1992; 2007). It seems that this is one route through which northern Greece was connected to the south. At this stage, however, this north to south connectivity was of much lower intensity than south to north.

Other small unlocated groups in the Mitrou data may reveal more if they can be better understood through future work. We are keeping our eye on the poorly understood Smee group and the X029 group. Other members have cropped up in previous sampling of MBA material from northwestern Anatolia and there are some typological parallels in the X029 group in particular. But X029 is also known in rare samples at Thebes in Late Bronze Age Mycenaean Lustrous-Decorated pottery (Andrikou et al. 2024), so may just as easily be from somewhere closer to home. 

We don't know enough yet to be confident that these groups represent real links between central Greece and the northeastern Aegean, but we hope we will find out soon!

- Chris Hale

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References:

Andrikou, E., Mommsen, H. and Maran, J. 2024. ‘The production and distribution of pottery in Mycenaean Thebes, Boeotia’, Annual of the British School at Athens 119, 283–96.

Gauß, W. and Kiriatzi, E.  2011. Pottery Production and Supply at Bronze Age Kolonna, Aegina: An Integrated Archaeological and Scientific Study of a Ceramic Landscape (Vienna).

Hale, C.M. and Sterba, J.H. 2025. ‘From pottery provenance to multiscale diachronic connectivity at Middle Bronze Age Mitrou, Greece’’, European Journal of Archaeology 28, 1–24.

Hale, C.M. 2023. ‘Pottery imports from the southern Aegean islands at Middle Bronze Age Mitrou’, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 51, 104174.

Maran, J. 1992. Die Deutschen Ausgrabungen Auf Der Pevkakia-Magula in Thessalien III: Die Mittlere Bronzezeit (Bonn).

Maran, J.  2007. ‘Emulation of Aeginetan pottery in the Middle Bronze Age of coastal Thessaly: regional context and social meaning’, in Felten, F., Gauss, W., and Smetana, R. (eds), Middle Helladic Pottery and Synchronisms (Wien), 167–82.

Spencer, L. and Mommsen, H.  2024. ‘Appendix III: Neutron Activation Analysis’, in Lerna IX: The Middle Helladic Pottery (Princeton, N.J.), 715–23.

Whitbread, I.K., Jones, R. and Spencer, L.  2024. ‘Fabrics, Local Production, and Imports’, in Lerna IX: The Middle Helladic Pottery (Princeton, N.J.), 345–418.

Whitbread, I., Mommsen, H. and Lindblom, M.  2024. ‘Petrographic and Chemical Groups’, in Lerna. A Preclassical Site in the Argolid X: The Shaft Graves and Other Late Helladic I and II Remains (Princeton), 274–90.