Bronze Age · 13th to 10th century BC · Aghios Vasileios, Xirokambi, Laconia, Greece
Mycenaean palace near Sparta was centre of Bronze Age Lacedaemonians, study argues
A Linear B archive at Aghios Vasileios and a hilltop sanctuary at Amyklai suggest the Spartans joined an older Lacedaemonian community rather than replacing it.
Peer-reviewed paper
Aghios Vasileios, Xirokambi, Greece A Mycenaean palace at Aghios Vasileios was the political centre of the Bronze Age Lacedaemonians, a new study argues. The site lies about 12 km south of modern Sparta. After the palace fell, a hilltop sanctuary at Amyklai held that community together.
The study is by historian Hans Beck of the University of Münster. It is published in The Annual of the British School at Athens. Beck combines recent excavation results from the Eurotas valley in the Peloponnese with a rereading of ancient texts. He concludes that the later Spartans joined an older Lacedaemonian world rather than wiping it out.
Until recently, scholars debated where Mycenaean power in Laconia was based. Some favoured Terapne, near Sparta. Excavations at Aghios Vasileios, near the village of Xirokambi, have moved that debate.
The site is a hill rising about 30 metres above the Eurotas plain. It has produced monumental buildings, a large court and high-quality fresco fragments. It has also produced 21 bronze swords and an archive of clay tablets.
Tablets name a king
The tablets are written in Linear B. This is the script Mycenaean palace administrations used to keep their accounts in the Late Bronze Age. According to one report of the study, Aghios Vasileios has yielded 204 tablet fragments. That puts its archive fourth in size among Mycenaean sites, behind Knossos, Pylos and Thebes.
The records list livestock, oil, wool, textiles, aromatic substances and animal products. One clay nodule bears the sign group wa-na-ko-to. Specialists read it as belonging to the wanax, the Mycenaean king.
Beck weighs this evidence together with the site's setting, which resembles other palace sites. Taken together, he writes, they make it hard not to conclude that Aghios Vasileios was the palatial centre of the Eurotas valley.
The Lacedaemonian name itself reaches back into the Bronze Age. Linear B tablets from Thebes, dated to around 1200 BC, mention people called Lakedaimonioi.
Beck argues that the Lacedaemonians were never a fixed or closed group. He prefers to speak of a sense of belonging rather than identity. In his view, this was a membership that could grow stronger or weaker over time. A farmer living far from the palace, in his reading, might have felt Lacedaemonian mostly at ceremonies, exchanges and gatherings on the hill.
The sanctuary outlived the palace
The palace was destroyed or abandoned in the 13th century BC or soon after. Reports of the study differ on the exact timing. One places the destruction in the middle of that century, another around the turn of the 12th. Its tablets ended up buried in the rubble.
A sanctuary about 7 km to the north was already in use during the palace period. It lies on the hill of Aghia Kyriaki, at the modern village of Amykles. Finds there include female and animal figurines, rhytons, drinking vessels and traces of banqueting.
Beck suggests the site was a ceremonial outpost of the palace. In his view, it received offerings and processions sent by the palace's rulers.
When the palace disappeared, the sanctuary grew. Pottery shows activity without a break from the 12th to the 10th century BC. Votive finds indicate that people kept gathering there into the Geometric period.
Wine bowls, cups and jugs came first. Later offerings include iron swords, spearheads, bronze pins, spindle whorls and figurines. Beck reads this as people continuing to gather of their own accord. In his reading, the hill became the Lacedaemonians' place of memory once there was no palace to unite them.
Sparta arrived later, Beck argues
Sparta itself shows no such continuity. Its acropolis has produced only a few fragments of Mycenaean pottery. It has produced nothing from the Submycenaean period, roughly 1100–950 BC. Beck considers it most plausible that the Spartans arrived later, during the Early Iron Age.
Spartan tradition, recorded by the poet Tyrtaeus in the 7th century BC, spoke of a Dorian conquest. The traveller Pausanias, in the 2nd century AD, described a struggle between the Amyclaeans and the Dorians. At the sanctuary, however, pottery, offerings and ritual continue without a visible break. Beck proposes a gradual process of assimilation instead of a violent takeover.
Amyklai became the meeting ground. At the Hyakinthia festival, Spartans travelled to the sanctuary for three days. The festival had processions, sacrifices, and athletic and musical contests. Ancient sources say young people sang local compositions from different places.
By the 6th century BC, a bronze-sheathed statue of Apollo stood on the hill. It was about 14 metres tall and carried a helmet, spear and bow. It stood above the tomb or altar of the local hero Hyakinthos. Visibility analyses by the Amykles Research Project indicate it could be seen across the plain.
Beck is sceptical of the idea that Amyklai became a fifth village of Sparta. The other four were Cynosura, Limnae, Mesoa and Pitana. The only document that explicitly calls Amyklai an obe, or village, is an inscription from the 2nd or 1st century BC.
He argues that what mattered was its role as a place of belonging. That role lasted into the Roman era, when Amyklai was still a sacred site.
Sources
- A Mycenaean Palace and a Sanctuary Rewrite the History of the Lacedaemonians, and How the Spartans Joined Them (La Brújula Verde)
- Mycenaean Palace Reveals Sparta Rose From an Older Lakedaimonian World (Arkeonews)
Paper: Beck, H. (2026). Places of belonging: archaeohistorical encounters with the Lakedaimonians at the Mycenaean palace of Aghios Vasileios and the Sanctuary of Apollo at Amykles. The Annual of the British School at Athens, 1–27. doi:10.1017/S0068245426100343
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