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Five Copper Axes from Greece

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2013

W. W. Phelps ,
G. J. Varoufakis  and
R. E. Jones
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Extract

Early copper axes from mainland Greece, whether flat or shaft-hole, are rare. Only four are attributable with more or less certainty to the Final Neolithic period: two from Sesklo, one from Alepotrypa and one from Pevkakia. There is one from Crete that was found in a Late Neolithic level at Knossos. Three others might belong to Early Bronze I: a flat axe each from Gona and Marathon Cave, and a unique hammer-axe from Levadia. The three Mainland hoards, from Eutresis, Thebes, and Petralona, containing shaft-hole and flat axes, have been assigned to the latter half of the Early Bronze Age.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 74 , November 1979 , pp. 175 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1979

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References

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13 They are published here by kind permission of the Managing Committee of the British School at Athens.

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18 These are indicated on the drawing which was made in the course of a binocular microscopic examination of the axe by Miss Alexandra Christopoulou. She is preparing a thesis on the trace-wear analysis of Thessalian stone tools.

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24 Expanded blades with narrow butts are characteristic of the Italian Copper Age Remedello culture (e.g. BPI x pl. 6.2; xxvii pl. 1.2) and of the Yugoslav Copper Age culture in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but the proportion of butt to blade width is much less extreme in the Italian examples, and the published Yugoslav axes are all thinner, plano-convex in section and have curving, not straight, sides.

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34 e.g. Τσούντας op. cit. pl. 41, 9; H. Goldman, Excavations at Eutresis in Boeotia (1931) fig. 278, 8.

35 Renfrew, op. cit. loc. cit.

36 Phelps, op. cit. 28 fig. 6, 31.

37 Renfrew, op. cit. 28 fig. 6, 31.

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