Introduction

1Fifteen years’ worth of excavations at Kommos from 1976-85 and again from 1991-95 produced abundant quantities of LM IIIB pottery from a wide variety of contexts. Such contexts can be differentiated according to how they were formed, where they are located, how large they are, what lies directly above and below them, and what kinds of activities they represent. The pottery from these contexts was sorted, recorded, analysed, and eventually published by two different ceramic analysts – namely, Vance Watrous for the 1976-85 excavations (Watrous 1992) and myself for those of 1991-95 (Rutter 2006a) – according to rather different procedures, with the result that the large number of contextual ‘deposits’ (Watrous’ term) or ‘groups’ (my own) datable to LM IIIB published from the site are not fully comparable1. This situation is undeniably regrettable, but common enough on large sites excavated over substantial periods of time: Knossos, Palaikastro, and Khania provide add