Philip B. Betancourt’s Introduction to Aegean Art, as its title suggests, presents a concise, up-to-date introduction to the art and culture of the Greek Bronze Age, ca. 3000–1000 BCE. Prehistoric Aegean art encompasses three distinct cultural realms: Minoan, Cycladic, and Helladic/Mycenaean. Narrative explanations of the origin of Western art often depict the art of these cultures as a vital link between the early artistic works of Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian civilizations and the later achievements of Classical antiquity. Yet Aegean prehistory itself remains a complex and rapidly evolving field of study too often accessible only to the specialist. To address this, Betancourt presents a summary of current, mainstream scholarly opinion on Aegean art and archaeology, and, as he states in his preface, remains rigorously selective in his discussion of material. Moreover, by maintaining a thematic focus on the history of ideas, Betancourt provides his intended audience of students and interested individuals with a clear presentation of the complexities of the field.

The book comprises an introduction and eight chapters organized into three chronological sections corresponding to the Early Bronze Age and the palatial Minoan and Mycenaean periods. Each chapter offers a period overview followed by discussion of material by category (Architecture, Pottery, Seals, Wall Paintings, Sculpture, Other Arts, etc.). Chapter 1 offers an overview of Aegean geography and problems of chronology. Betancourt opens his investigation of Aegean material culture with a brief lesson in how artistic images express ideas as visual metaphors. This interest in the conceptual world of prehistoric Aegean populations is balanced throughout the volume by practical yet perceptive explanations of the technologies and material remains of the cultural periods discussed.

Chapters 2–4 explore prepalatial Early Bronze Age developments in the Aegean Islands, Crete, and the Greek Peninsula, ca. 3000–2000 BCE. Chapter 2 on the Aegean Islands discusses the major monuments of art and architecture of the five roughly sequential island populations: the Grotta-Pelos, Kampos, Keros-Syros, Kastri, and Phylakopi I Groups. Concluding comments emphasize both the transitory nature of Early Cycladic settlements and the lasting impact that their extraordinary sculptural forms made on modern art.

Chapter 3 presents an overview of Early Minoan (EM) Crete before the rise of the Minoan palaces, ca. 3000–2000 BCE. Settlement architecture and evidence for religious belief is discussed through the example of the unfortified village of Myrtos. Communal tomb constructions (natural caves, tholos and house tombs, cist graves, and rock shelters), together with grave goods, are discussed as they reveal regional variation on Crete with a common emphasis on ceremonies in honor of the dead. Ceramics, stone bowls, gold jewelry, seals, and other arts offer evidence for growing wealth and expanding trade with the wider Mediterranean world.

Chapter 4 reviews Early Helladic (EH) evidence on the Greek peninsula ca. 3000–2000 BCE for the growth of trade and technologies that gave rise to the Aegean’s first monumental public structures, corridor houses. The House of the Tiles at Lerna and its fortified predecessor, Building BG, are discussed in relation to contemporary fortified sites elsewhere in the Aegean. Betancourt notes that ceramic assemblages and evidence for sealing practices point to corridor houses functioning in an official capacity and hosting communal activities. The destruction of the House of the Tiles at Lerna and other sites at the end of EH II coincides with the appearance of new elements of material culture associated with the Kastri Group. Betancourt summarizes alternative views as to whether these changes represent a small-scale invasion of newcomers or an expansion of trade with Anatolia.

Chapters 5–7 survey Minoan palatial civilization and its influence on the Aegean Islands as well as the emerging Mycenaean culture of the Greek Peninsula from the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) to the first phase of the Late Bronze Age (LB I), ca. 2000–1450 BCE. Betancourt presents Protopalatial and Neopalatial Minoan material together in chapter 5, a structure that emphasizes cultural continuity during these two phases of Minoan civilization. Crete’s principal palaces, including those recently discovered at Galatas and Petras, are insightfully introduced according to their unique situations in time, space, and access to resources. Betancourt rightly identifies the central court as one of Minoan Crete’s most important contributions to world architecture. House and shrine architecture are described and illustrated, but villa architecture is omitted. The remainder of this chapter pays tribute to the many achievements of Minoan artists, particularly the rise of naturalism in representational art, through discussions of ceramics (e.g., Kamares Ware, Marine Style ceramics), glyptic art, fresco painting, and small-scale figural sculpture and relief vases.

Chapter 6 discusses the Aegean Islands under the influence of Minoan Crete. Betancourt features the Minoanized town of Akrotiri, on Thera, and its many buildings, frescoes, and ceramics preserved by volcanic eruption. He advocates the use of model books (now lost) to explain similarities of Aegean style and iconography across time and space.

Chapter 7 reviews evidence for the rise of early Mycenaean culture on the Greek mainland. Betancourt covers Middle Helladic (MH) and early Late Helladic (LH) ceramics, architecture, sculpture, and metalwork with a particular focus on the extraordinary offerings buried in LH I–II tombs (including many Minoan imports). Though the sources of this new wealth remain unknown, Betancourt observes that rising prosperity evidently had a transformative impact on Mycenaean culture.

Chapters 8–9 survey Mycenaean society in the Greek peninsula and its influence across the Aegean until the end of the Bronze Age in LH IIIC. The Mycenaeans are presented as warriors, builders, traders, and bureaucrats whose writing system, known as Linear B, is preserved on clay tablets that, while not historical in content, do open an important window onto Mycenaean society. Major architectural monuments (Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos) are described by photographs and numbered plans. The discussion of frescoes of warriors, hunters, and women contrasts the Mycenaean interest in heroic prowess and elite group identity with the ruler iconography of Egyptian and Near Eastern contexts. The concluding comments emphasize the contributions the Mycenaeans made to later history and architecture.

This excellent introduction to Aegean art reflects a lifetime of knowledge presented with practiced clarity and skill in undergraduate teaching. Typographical errors are few (e.g., the numbering of the Tiryns plan includes a rare mistake), and the illustrations are very good. Although this reviewer hopes that future editions will add a concluding chapter, the volume’s balanced presentation of complex problems of interpretation, together with its broad coverage of prehistoric material, make this book an enjoyable read and an excellent choice as a textbook for college courses on ancient art. Professors teaching specialized upper-level undergraduate courses on Aegean art and archaeology will want to supplement with additional readings. Finally, it is worth noting that the author receives no royalties from this book, and all profits are donated to the Institute for Aegean Prehistory Academic Press.

Senta G. German’s Performance, Power and the Art of the Aegean Bronze Age, in contrast, is a recent dissertation published as a monograph intended for specialists. German’s investigation applies contemporary performance theory to Minoan and Mycenaean images of bull leaping and dance preserved on seals, sealings, signet rings, and to a lesser extent on frescoes and other art objects. Her thesis, as stated in the introduction, is that the glyptic images of bull leaping and dance served as “identifiers of palatial authority through their indexical relationship to larger representations [e.g., frescoes] and performance of social drama found at the palaces” (9). The introduction, five chapters, and a short conclusion all investigate various aspects of this idea.

The introduction presents three categories of non-theatrical performance: performativity, the performance of an act, and social drama. German’s definition of performativity follows that of Judith Butler and is closely related to gender identification, or how individuals behave in order to identify themselves with gender. Within the theoretical construct of the performative body, German identifies gender, class, and age as important social categories in the Aegean Bronze Age. Next, performance of an act is defined as a “discrete, regularized activity, simple or complex, executed with deliberate action” (12). Her third category, social drama, follows Victor Turner’s multi-step anthropological model for a “series of structured social events which address crisis in a culture” (13). German argues that these performative categories are recognizable in Aegean art and that they worked to create and maintain social identities in both Minoan and Mycenaean societies.

Chapter 1, “Performance and Social Categories,” examines selected works of Minoan and Mycenaean art through the lens of performance theory. German observes that the gender of the performative body is distinguished by secondary sexual characteristics: females have large breasts and wide hips; males have broad shoulders and narrow waists. Youth is indicated through lithe musculature and age-related hairstyle, and elite social status is suggested by jewelry and elaborate costuming. German, however, does not address the problem that specific details, particularly individual hairstyles, are difficult to distinguish on glyptic art and thus may not be reliable indicators of age and/or status. Indeed, recent scholarship links some distinctive hairstyles with youth, but a consensus on their association with specific age grades has yet to emerge.

German notes that both performers and audiences are depicted in miniature frescoes from Knossos (e.g., the Sacred Grove and Dance Fresco), and that these compositions offer compelling evidence for the importance of performance in the Aegean Bronze Age. Unfortunately, surviving frescoes remain incompletely preserved. As German notes (27), the Grandstand Fresco from Knossos depicts a crowd but not a performance. More problematically, German’s illustration of a bull-leaping performance (28) follows an unconfirmed suggestion made by Sir Arthur Evans in 1921 (The Palace of Minos at Knossos, London: Macmillan, vol. 1, 527–28) that non-joining fragments painted on varying scales found in the lower cists of West Magazine XIII at Knossos all belong to a single composition.

Chapter 2, “Bull Leaping,” opens with a helpful theoretical discussion of problems of objectivity encountered when observing unfamiliar cultures and behaviors. This awareness of modern bias forms the background against which bull-leaping images are examined. German surveys bull-leaping art diachronically and then reviews modern scholarship, evidence for bull sports in Classical mythology, and contemporary bull sports. Lastly, German discusses the images of bull leaping as evidence for age, gender, and status in the Aegean Bronze Age as revealed through the depiction of movement, danger, and the strength/vigor of the leapers. This chapter would benefit from more exacting collection and presentation of data. Well-known images of bull leaping are omitted (e.g., the gold Vaphio cup with bull-leaping decoration) while others seem misdated (e.g., the miniature bull-leaping fresco from the Queen’s Megaron at Knossos [cat. 88] is generally dated to the Neopalatial rather than the Final Palatial period). Furthermore, some Minoan seals and signet rings were likely kept as heirlooms in the Mycenaean era. This problem affects the chronological discussion of bull leaping, and indeed, many scholars today doubt whether Mycenaeans actually engaged in the sport.

In Chapter 3, “Measured Movement: Dance and Procession,” German defines Aegean dance imagery as the “static representation of patterned movement” (54). Specific arm motions identify German’s dancers, though elsewhere in scholarly literature many of these gestures are believed to identify adorants participating in religious ritual. German’s catalogue of dance highlights glyptic images; a more extensive database would no doubt have included well-known works such as the LM I Harvester Vase or the LM IIIA Procession Frescoes from Ayia Triada, or the fresco of the processing women from the building known as Xeste 3 on Thera. The chapter closes with a stimulating discussion of Aegean dance and procession performance in relation to postmodern, anthropological, and religious theory.

Chapter 4 investigates the archaeological contexts of the catalogued objects in an effort to deepen an understanding of how images functioned in prehistory. Catalogued material is assigned to palatial, funerary, storage/administrative, and settlement categories according to excavated find contexts. These categories, however, overlap to some extent. Palaces, for instance, served storage and administrative functions in both Minoan and Mycenaean cultures, and Minoan villas, which German groups with settlement architecture, shared many features and functions with Minoan palaces. Assigning a contextual category to any given object can be a complicated task, and questions arise when, for instance, on page 77 the Palanquin Fresco from the House of the Oil Merchant at Mycenae is assigned a palatial rather than a settlement context, yet on page 80 a sealing from the same house is awarded a storage/administrative context. Similarly confusing, on page 81 a sealing from the archive room of the Mycenaean palace at Pylos is assigned a storage/administrative context. Nevertheless, German is likely correct in her overall assessment that images of bull leaping and dance come from elite contexts and are associated with palaces, palace administrations, and personal wealth.

In Chapter 5, “Meanings of Performance: Interpreting the Images,” German argues that images of bull leaping and dancing found on seals and signet rings functioned as signs of identity for those in positions of social authority, first on Crete and later in Mycenaean Greece. For German, these images served as an index—or in other words, as a reference—to larger representations of social dramas decorating the palaces as frescoes, which in turn represented actual events. This interpretation intriguingly links small-scale personal items (seals and signet rings) with monumental wall painting through a shared function in which both forms of art were used by an elite class to create and maintain social identities. Though this thesis is ultimately impossible to prove, it offers an attractive interpretation in which art is understood not as a passive reflection of the past but as an active agent that helped to shape the society that created it

The conclusion daringly posits that the social dramas preserved today as images of bull leaping and dance were used by palatial elites in response to social pressures felt at the beginning of the Neopalatial Period, when, according to some readings of the evidence, kin-based social structures were replaced by new social groupings based on gender, age, and class. This section raises interesting questions and deserves further study, but it also highlights a fundamental problem confronting all Aegean prehistorians—that without historical records the current understanding of Aegean social structures and forms of government remains theoretical and tentative at best.

While German’s innovative theoretical approach offers an important lens through which to investigate the social functions of Aegean art, numerous typographical and grammatical mistakes within the text, frequent bibliographic errors (content, spelling, and formatting), together with mistakes referencing both individual works of art and their illustration, diminish the positive impact of this study. Nevertheless, the investigation has much merit, and the methodology could, and perhaps should, be applied to other forms of prehistoric performative art.