Regional Variation in the Pottery of Late Helladic IIIB

The pottery of the LH IIIB period has frequently been treated as if it were a homogeneous product, uniform throughout the Mycenaean area; and LH IIIB has been envisaged, by several scholars, as the period above all of the Mycenaean Koine Furumark, however, who considered the pottery of LH IIIA2 rather than LH IIIB to be “the Koine style par preference”, emphasised the degree of local development during LH IIIB in certain parts of the Mycenaean world, particularly in Cyprus and in Rhodes. Nevertheless, he regarded LH IIIB as “the period of the greatest Mycenaean expansion”, with the Argolid as the “political and cultural centre of the Aegean world”, and on the Mainland, where LH IIIB settlement material was scarce, particularly in areas other than the Argolid, a blanket definition of the pottery of this period was drawn mainly from tombs, over half of which were Argive. While recognising that some of his LH IIIB groups were stylistically later than others, Furumark left the period chronologically undivided.