The Lion Gate is an icon, a piece of art more than 3300 years old, representing the glory of Mycenaean Greece. Preserved in situ, it has passed through time and circumstance, witnessing its own civilisation fail and many others flourishing since. Often considered as an emblem for the royal house of Mycenae, it is the only surviving piece of large-scale sculpture of the Greek Bronze Age.

The date of the de­struc­tion of the palace at Knos­sos on Crete has been one of the key problems of Aegean pre­his­tory since the palace was ex­ca­vated at the be­gin­ning of the 20th cen­tury. The ex­ca­va­tor Arthur Evans ar­gued for an LM II date as he pre­sumed that the inscribed tablets found in the palace de­struc­tion lay­ers must have been writ­ten by the peo­ple who had pro­duced the large and richly adorned Palace Style jars which he dated to the LM II pe­riod.

Το παρόν βιβλίο αναδεικνύει τις εικόνες ως μεθοδολογικά σύνθετα ερευνητικά εργαλεία μελέτης της προϊστορικής αρχιτεκτονικής στην Ελλάδα. Εξετάζονται 200 και πλέον τελικές δημοσιεύσεις ανασκαφών προϊστορικών αρχαιολογικών θέσεων από την πρώτη ανασκαφή του Heinrich Schliemann στις Μυκήνες το 1876 μέχρι σήμερα.

As editors and organisers, we were gratified to note a good number of early- and mid-career scholars among those contributing to this volume, and even more early-career scholars and students had expressed an interest in attending the meeting itself, leaving the editors in no doubt that interest in Mycenaean, and indeed Aegean studies more widely, is unbroken and continues to attract the intellectual attention of rising academics in a large number of disciplines.

The site of Phylakopi on Melos occupies a special place in the prehistory of the Aegean Bronze Age. The first work there by the British School at Athens in 1896–99 (there were two further campaigns, in 1911 and 1974–77) was memorably described by Carl Blegen as ‘the first really serious effort to understand stratification, the first really good excavation in Greece’. The Field Director, Duncan Mackenzie, kept detailed day-to-day records of the work, later applying methods developed on Melos to the excavation of Knossos.