Pseira is a small island on the eastern side of the Gulf of Mirabello in northeastern Crete (Ill. 1). The island is a little over two kilometers at its greatest dimension, with a maximum width of one kilometer (Ill. 2). It is oriented northeast-southwest. The island’s northwest side, facing the open sea, is steep and almost inaccessible, while the opposite side, toward Crete, is lower and more inviting. Pseira’s human settlement began in the Neolithic period when new residents to this part of Crete settled on the offshore island (Betancourt 1999a). They built houses of stone and mud brick on...

Pseira Island was visited by Harriet Boyd and her team while they were excavating at Kavousi, Gournia, and other Cretan sites as a part of the process of searching for new places to work; its archaeological site was described in one of the preliminary reports for Gournia (Boyd 1904–05, 21): “Psyra, an island off the shore of Kavousi Bay, is covered with megalithic walls and strewn with excellent specimens of decorated ware similar to the best pottery from Gournia.” By 1906, Boyd had married Charles Hawes and retired from fieldwork, and her assistant Richard Seager continued the excavations in...

A surface survey, with its holistic approach and comprehensive view, is a useful complement to the series of specific glimpses provided by the excavation of individual tombs. A survey’s results are more important for a site like Pseira than would be the case for less disturbed cemeteries because of the fragmentary picture provided by the excavation alone. Most of the evidence from the burials themselves is lost forever. Seager’s failure to publish the 33 graves he excavated is only part of the problem. The extreme erosion of the cemetery scattered much of the evidence long before Seager arrived. The soil...

The Minoan cemetery associated with the Pseira settlement has undergone a number of phases of investigation, which have yielded information on its extent, contents, orientation on the slope of the hill, and dates of usage. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Richard Seager investigated the tombs of this cemetery area, along with the domestic structures of the settlement, but little is known of the tomb contents that he retrieved. The modern project has conducted surface surveys of the cemetery area and produced plan and section drawings of the visible tombs, as well as a topographic map of the cemetery...

The Pseiran cemetery can only be understood within its local and regional context. It represents the burial-place for a community that was first founded in the Final Neolithic period and that gradually grew to become a significant town within the regional Minoan culture of eastern Crete. Its abandonment in MM IIB, when the Minoans were still in their ascendancy economically, and when the town on Pseira itself would soon become larger and more important, must have been a decisive event in Pseira Island’s history.

New residents probably arrived in this part of Crete in the Final Neolithic period (Ill. 5)....

In 1988 and 1989, Fotini Zervaki supervised the surface pottery collection of the cemetety area. John McEnroe and his assistants laid out a 5 meter square grid system to aid in the recording of artifacts. All pottery and other finds, including both animal and human bones, were retained; they are published here.

The material is all in fragments (not a single complete vessel came from the surface). A complete and detailed record of all the pottery, organized by grid-square, is presented in statistical tables. Pottery is listed in tabular form, following the system designed jointly by Betancourt (1990a) and Watrous...

The intensive survey of Pseira examined the island in considerable detail, identifying over 300 individual locations with evidence for human activity. Some of these locations are relevant to the cemetery, and they are discussed here. The remainder of the survey will be presented in a future volume.

For the Pseira Survey, the island was divided into 500-meter grid-squares to assist in mapping. Each of the grid-squares was assigned a letter, and sites with evidence of human use were given Arabic numbers in consecutive order within each grid-square. Squares were walked systematically by the survey team of 4 to 5 persons,...

The surface survey of Site Q 22 revealed a series of upright metacarbonate slabs. Although the upright position of the row of stones suggested comparisons with the better-preserved threshing floors on Pseira Island, the identification could not be confirmed without some excavation. In order to discover for certain whether or not the feature was a threshing floor, one trench was excavated in 1988 under the supervision of Vasso Zographaki. The Minoan pottery found in the excavation was studied by Philip Betancourt, and the Byzantine pottery was studied by Natalia Poulou-Papadimitriou. After only a little excavation, the site could be securely...

The finds from a group of survey sites near the cemetery present a picture that is very different from that of a settlement, a cemetery with built tombs, or an agricultural area. These sites, Q 27 to 31, border the cemetery area at the north and east. They are located on the landward side of the cemetery, above and near the location for the tombs (Ill. 2).

The land here is eroded and barren, with no traces of buildings and no visible built features except for terrace walls. That the area is not a part of the main cemetery is...

Because Richard Seager did not publish his excavations in the Pseira cemetery, very little information about the site was available before the modern project began. Seager worked in the cemetery area at the end of his excavation season in the spring of 1907, uncovering 33 tombs. He did not count the small cave-tombs (called rock shelters) within this number, presumably because they were already empty (see the description by his colleague Edith Hall in 1912). No trench notebooks have ever been discovered, and details of tomb architecture and burial practices were not recorded in published form except for brief discussions...