The North West Palace Project

The excavations conducted in the early 1900s by British archaeologist and pioneer Arthur Evans and his teams uncovered a wealth of buildings surrounding the large palace, the center of Bronze Age Knossos. Yet, our understanding of the settlement’s urban organization, as well as its social life, is still rather limited. The North West Palace Project aims at opening a window into this topic, by focusing on a selected quarter of the site, the built area North West of the large Palace and along the Royal Road. The project aims to study the material assemblages, chiefly pottery, from two of the buildings excavated by Arthur J. Evans in that area: the so-called Arsenal and the Northwest Treasure House. Both buildings were excavated in the early 1900s and subsequently backfilled.  

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The several excavations carried out by Evans (and others after him) have yielded the remains of many interesting buildings along the Royal Road. The study of the House of the Frescoes (Oddo 2022), the first publication concerning this quarter, has shown that the buildings along the Royal Road were not houses, as previously thought, but rather had public and, possibly, industrial functions, perhaps related to the needs of the Palace. With this knowledge, the integrated analysis of the Northwest Treasure House and the Arsenal and their finds has the potential to enrich this picture.

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Within KLASP, my team works on mining the meta-archaeological information related to the Arsenal and the Northwest Treasure House. Meta-archaeological information means both the study of the material excavated by Evans (predominantly pottery) and the archival data related to the excavation itself. Only by merging these two aspects, that is recreating the finds’ contexts in and around the buildings, we can extract the data to interpret the social and urban significance of these two buildings.