Late Bronze Age (Late Helladic period c.1650 to 1200 BCE) [ setting | project | solution ] See Early Bronze Age

Setting

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Aerial view of trench EU5 showing some of the massive walls from House A; © 1986 Nemea Valley Archaeological Project.

Tsoungiza is an important site for the good preservation of the settlement remains dating to the beginning of the Late Bronze Age.  Walls forming a complete house from the first phase of the Late Bronze Age (Late Helladic I, c. the late 17th century BCE) are preserved.  The building, called the West House, had burned in antiquity and the collapsing debris covered a deposit of cooking, drinking and eating vessels, animal bones, and a string of garlic which had been carbonized by the fire.

The rectangular house of megaron shape had three main rooms in a line.  There may have been a porch at the front, but modern plowing has removed all traces in this area.  The main room is distinguished by four elements:

• a rectangular slab in the center, which probably supported a wooden post
• a circular stone-lined hearth behind the slab
• a deposit of cooking and drinking vessels fallen in the northern corner of the room
• a crudely laid floor or cobbles along the southern half of the room

From this main room, a central doorway connects to a second room.  The wall between these rooms was built of mudbrick, a layer of which was preserved.  Inside the room, the northern part was filled with collapsed, disintegrated mudbrick.  Under the brick were many cloves of garlic, which had probably been strung in a braid and suspended from the wall.  In the southern part of the room were a cooking pot and the remains of a goat.

Behind the second room is a third, but the floor level is about 30cm higher.  The wall between these rooms was robbed out, possibly to use its building stones for an adjacent structure built in the next period; it is consequently unclear how this back room was entered (perhaps from the outside).

A doorway in the south wall of the main room leads to a fourth room, which the excavators believe was added later.  On the threshold of the doorway lay a small bronze chisel.  Inside this room was much pottery characteristic of the Late Helladic I period

After the fire, a building was re-erected following the same plan immediately to the northeast. Calibrated radiocarbon dates for the West House are from 1602 to 1533 BCE, which are close to those from radiocarbon determinations of the volcanic destruction of the settlement of Akrotiri on the island of Thera during the, contemporary, Late Minoan IA period.  The Late Bronze Age building remains from Tsoungiza are important for there is very little excavated evidence of nonroyal residential structures dated to this time.  Instead the period is characterized by tombs, especially the rich shaft graves at Mycenae.  One of the major questions that interested the ecavators was the relationship between settlement on Tsoungiza and that at Mycenae, not far away.

Some of the project goals laid out by the NVAP team during their analyses of data from this later phase of occupation included:

• What are the key architectural and artifactual remains that could benefit from virtual reality modeling in order to enhance the overall publication?
• How would this phase of the overall history of the site fit into the publication schema established for the Early Bronze Age material?
• Could analyses and database material from the different periods be successfully integrated into a single comprehensive publication, as a framework for finishing the rest of the site?

The NVAP team was also interested specifically in visualizing the West House, not only in comparison to House A of the Early Bronze Age (from trench EU5), but also in comparison to house forms known from later Iron Age contexts.

Exterior Render	Exterior Render	Interior Render
Rendering of the West House at Tsoungiza as it may have originally appeared during the Late Bronze Age; from the virtual reality reconstruction of the building; © 2000 Learning Sites, Inc

The major trench with remains from the Late Bronze Age (EU7) was modeled as it was excavated and coverted into virtual reality, as was the West House, and several diagnostic artifacts from the period. The overall interface and functionality of the preliminary publication were upgraded and expanded, not only to accommodate the new material, but with placeholders for the rest of the data. A full working searchable database with several 1000 objects was completed, with links from the search results leading to photos, drawings, virtual models, in-context views, and database records for each hit. As more information is processed by the NVAP team and provided to Learning Sites, they will continue to move toward completion of the digital excavation report.

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Reference
Page Created: February 10, 2005
Page Updated: February 18, 2005
URL:
Page Author: The Institute for the Visualization of History