The Organisation of the Theran Artists

Within this framework, one can distinguish the levels of skill and experience of different artists, and in several cases follow their development. The high degree of variation and trial and error exhibited in the work of some artists is indicative of a youthful stage of a wall painting tradition, characterised by a thriving apprenticeship system.

An Appendix to this paper offers some additions and amendments to the author's earlier discussion of youth and age as represented in the Thera frescoes (Davis 1986).

The question of the organisation of the Theran painters can be illuminated by identifying individual artists. This has been possible due to the superb quality of The wall-paintings of Thera (Doumas 1992), for which I would like to thank Professor Christos Doumas, Petros Nomikos and the Thera Foundation. My paper could not have been given without it.

Identifying artists, of course, involves attribution studies. For this I have used the 'Morellian' method, despite the recent criticism of it (Cherry 1992). This calls for precise observation of details, which makes for tedious reading. My observations, therefore, will be confined to a few important ones, which can be seen in the illustrations of details. I will focus on the paintings of Delta 2 and Xeste 3, which have close connections, as Televantou (1992, 152-153) has already pointed out, and on the figures from the House of the Ladies.

Mary Hollinshead jump-started the process of attribution on Thera with her convincing demonstration that the seven swallows of Delta 2 (Doumas 1992, figs. 72-76) (Pls. 17-18) were painted by the same artist who painted swallows in Xeste 3 (Hollinshead 1989, 341-345). She made her attribution on the basis of the only swallow from Xeste 3 that had been published when she wrote (Marinatos 1976, pl. 39b). Now five new swallows from Xeste 3, two published by Televantou (1992, pl. XLIII:a,c) and three by Doumas (1992, figs. 97-99), completely confirm its correctness. All have the same features: they are represented in profile or from below with their white parts reserved against the ground, their feet prominent, and their tails twisted round to show part of the black backs.

Hollinshead carefully considered the puzzling situation on the south wall, where a lily and a swallow appear to collide (Doumas 1992, fig. 72). She noted that the swallow artist "failed to make the outline and the complex angle of the pose visually comprehensible". She noted a similar awkwardness on the north wall (Doumas 1992, fig. 74) "where a pair of swallows is inappropriately close to a large cluster of oversize blossoms behind the bird on the left". She, like many others, commented on the disproportion in scale between the lilies and the swallows. Immerwahr (1990, 47) and now Betancourt (here, vol. I) have emphasised the contrast between the three-dimensionality of the swallows and the two-dimensionality of the lilies. In the paper presented at this Symposium, Betancourt used the same detail (Doumas 1992, fig. 74) to illustrate the lack of integration of setting and individual elements within it in Theran painting: "The elements can be observed in perspective, as the flying swallows are, or they can be flattened, as the clumps of lilies are in the same composition."

Hollinshead's conclusion that "there must have been more than one painter" best explains these disjunctions and inconsistencies. I also agree with her that the use of the true fresco technique would have required more than one artist, given the limited time in which the paintings could be executed. This has been confirmed at this Symposium by the presentation of the replication studies conducted by Elisabeth Chryssikopoulou and her colleagues. They concluded that the optimum when artists could work was from two to seven hours.

Hollinshead's further conclusion that the Theran painters worked as subject specialists is also convincing. I would like to carry her analysis further in Delta 2. The excellent state of preservation of the frescoes in that room and the limited number of painted motifs allow us a clear 'window of perception' into how the artists divided up the work and the sequence in which it was executed. It may provide some surprises.

The sequence can be clearly established by noting what is painted over what, which is easy to see in the high quality reproductions of Doumas (1992). The lily does not overlap the swallow on the north wall as Hollinshead thought. An enlargement of the detail (Fig. 1) reveals that the thinner black paint of the swallow's wing and legs goes over the red lily petal and stamen. It has flaked off in places from the surface of the red. This frequently occurs in Aegean fresco painting when black (which is usually the last colour painted in Aegean fresco) is applied over other pigments, as for example, the black of the terrain in Doumas 1992, figs. 70-71 (Pl. 15). So the lily painter worked first, before the swallow painter.

The lily artist, like the swallow artist, was a specialist. He worked, somewhat like an oriental brush painter, with a quick and expert hand, executing his general idea of the plant more than eighteen times. He applied his 'essentialist' formula (following Warren's terminology) of four stages of the lily: buds at the top, buds just unfolding, the petals just unfolded, and the petals fully opened (Doumas 1992, figs. 74, 69, 70) (Pl. 15), with constant variations to imitate those of nature. He painted the lily flowers first, most likely all over the room, while he had the red paint on his brush. His 'bud just unfolding' stage is unique among Aegean fresco depictions of the lily, which are collected by Davis (1990, 218-220). There are indications that the artist was developing it while in the course of painting in Delta 2. He used it tentatively on the west and south walls, and very frequently on the north wall:

     West (7 plants):  5 opening buds, on 3 plants, 1 with anthers (Doumas 1992, fig. 69)

     South (6 plants): 6 opening buds, on 4 plants, 2 with anthers

     North (5 plants): 11 opening buds, on all 5 plants, 8 with anthers, some with connecting filaments.

The yellow stems and leaves were painted next; the paint overlaps that of the flowers throughout. Again, the 'essentialist' pattern (Doumas 1992, fig. 70) (Pl. 15) of two basal leaves on each side with another between each stem is altered to imitate the variations in nature and, in one case (Doumas 1992, fig. 69), to adapt to plants growing on either side of the terrain.

The lily painter played the major part in establishing the composition. He was responsible for the relentless units of three on each wall by means of the alternate up-and-down positions of the clumps, the same triadic scheme that he applied to all but two of his lily plants, as Doumas (1992, 100) and others have noted.

The terrain was executed after the lilies. The paint overlaps the bottoms of each of the plants (see Doumas 1992, figs. 69-71) (Pl. 15). The yellow ochre of the terrain has a different hue, less saturated than that of the plant stems, which indicates a new artist. Consider his task: the upper contours of the terrain had to be positioned to support each of the scattered plants. The terrain 'rises to the occasion', resulting in an energetic leaping landscape. Some adventurously protruding crags accommodate lower lily plants. Some of the upper contours of the terrain carry out the concave curves of the outer plant leaves, which contribute to the harmony of the composition.

The terrain was actually executed by three artists, a master and two apprentices. One worked on each of the walls. The master painted the larger and more prominent west wall (Doumas 1992, fig. 66), while the two artists of the north (Doumas 1992, fig. 67) and south (Doumas 1992, fig. 68) walls followed his procedure and style. This consisted of first laying on large areas of red, yellow and blue. On the south wall (Doumas 1992, fig. 71), the colour divisions are repetitive (red, yellow, blue, red, yellow, blue, arranged in verticals) compared with the great variety of colour combinations (including two shades of red and of blue) and shapes on the west wall. This procedure was followed by the over-painting of contour lines in black, and of streaks, blobs, pointed arches, multiple lines etc. to imitate rockwork. In this detailing, the west wall artist (Fig. 3) again employed a much richer vocabulary than the artist of the south wall (Fig.2). He favoured globular shapes to suggest rock inclusions, and sometimes triple concentric blobs and multicoloured ones. Both artists tried to avoid or minimise the use of yellow under the yellow lily plants.

In contrast, the third artist of the north wall (Doumas 1992, fig. 68) placed a large yellow area under a plant. Less of his work is preserved, but what remains suggests a less accomplished artist. He did use two shades of blue, but he employed a more limited repertory of shapes and rockwork, mostly streaks. One streak on his red wall runs parallel to the upper contour, a feature that does not occur in the other paintings. The upper shapes of his terrain lack the variety and energy of those on the other walls.

The poorest artist was given the smallest of the areas, since the passage to the stairway cuts into his wall. This wise decision was surely made by the master. Although the terrain master worked last, he and his assistants executed the great majority of the painting. There is a sign of prior consultation between the lily and the terrain painter at the beginning of the west wall (Doumas 1992, fig. 69), where the inner leaves of two lily plants were adapted in anticipation of the high-rising hill.

Five artists, therefore, worked in this small room, less than 6 square metres, three of them specialists and one with two apprentices. They worked in a predetermined sequence in order to fit in the room. The painting was done relatively quickly in order for all three painters to finish before the plaster got too dry for the paint to bond. There is no sign that anyone of the three main painters, the swallowpainter, the lily painter, or the terrain master, was in charge of the others. It is inconceivable that any artist made a prior drawing of the composition as a whole for the others to follow. All of the execution consists of 'painterly' brushwork, applied spontaneously by each of the specialists in his own manner. Televantou's term, the 'Free style', is apt. The painters were surely familiar with one another's work, and they must have discussed their project beforehand. The visual evidence suggests a collaboration among three specialists of some status, each with a certain independence. One could even conceive that the swallow master contrived his collision of swallow and lily on the south wall (Doumas 1992, fig. 72) as a protest. The lily master had left him little space for his flying swallows! What all three artists shared was the desire to maximise the vitality and energy of each of their three motifs.

Like the swallow painter, terrain artists of the same school worked in Xeste 3. Hollinshead (1989, 346) has noted the similarity. The master seems to have painted the largest portion of terrain, that on the first floor east wall, which continued on the north (Figs. 3, 4). Characteristic in Delta 2 is his liking for globular shapes on the dark blue areas, which suggest rock inclusions (Doumas 1992, fig. 69). In Xeste 3 the globules are yellow, surrounded by black to set them off, one with a black oval in the middle of the yellow (Doumas 1992, figs. 118, 120). The blue colour appears at the top of the terrain, leaving the artist with only yellow and red to alternate at the bottom. This is somewhat like the treatment of the two highest hills over the first town on the south wall of the 'Ship fresco' from the West House (Doumas, 1992, figs. 71-72), and may be the artist's way of indicating the rocky hilltops where crocus flowers grow. Here, as in Delta 2, the terrain overlaps the plants, and the artist had to adapt it to them (Doumas 1992, fig. 118). In Xeste 3 the crocus plants were adapted to the human figures, which in this case were painted first. On the east wall, a leaf of the crocus plant overlaps a crocus-picking finger of each of the girls. The terrain painter took great care to place the upper contours just under the feet of each girl so as to avoid overlapping.

A different artist from the same 'school' painted the much smaller terrain areas in the 'lustral basin', which surround the 'initiate' at the top and bottom (Doumas 1992, fig. 100). This artist used two shades of red, and a third darker red that appears brown. He has painted multiple vertical strokes along the top contours, that tend to give it a soft, almost grassy look. He uses multiple verticals for his rockwork forms more frequently than the artist of the first storey. His terrain overlaps the seated figure at the rear (Doumas 1992, fig. 100). This might be the artist of the south wall of Delta 2 (compare Doumas 1992, fig. 71), although the evidence is by no means conclusive. Another artist from the same 'school' appears to have painted the bits of landscape in the monkey and swallow paintings from Room 4 (Doumas 1992, figs. 95-99), which also include landscape hanging from above. Attribution study must await the full range of preserved evidence, including the terrain paintings of the entrance stairway (Marinatos 1974, pls. 23:a.b).

If the terrain on the first floor of Xeste 3 is the work of the west wall master in Delta 2, it is clear that we see the artist at an earlier phase of development. In Delta 2 he has substituted light blue (Doumas 1992, fig. 69) for the yellow globules on the dark blue ground (Doumas 1992, fig. 120). This was an improvement; yellow ochre does not show up well over darker colours. The rest of his rockwork is much simpler in Xeste 3, mostly pointed arches and streaks of red and black. The painter had not yet developed the rich vocabulary of Delta 2. The swallow artist also appears more accomplished in Delta 2. He had not quite mastered the back wing of the swallow with the dragonfly (Doumas 1992, fig. 97), nor the feet and tail of the swallow who appears to be landing (Doumas 1992, fig. 99) in Xeste 3. Delta 2 must have been painted after Xeste 3, although the time between them may not have been long.

Hollinshead (1989, 346-347) attributed the antelopes of Beta 1 to the swallow painter, a suggestion that has much merit. Both she and Televantou have attributed the female figures of the crocus gathering scene of the first storey and those of the 'lustral basin' to the swallow artist. These female figures are executed in fine even outlines in a manner that differs from the calligraphic shape-painting of the swallow and antelopes. What they share with the swallow and antelopes is a three-dimensional sense and an interest in movement. These female figures have close affinities to those of the House of the Ladies. The artists appear to be from the same 'school' of figure specialists. Each figure from Xeste 3 appears to have been executed by a different artist, although they share a general style of painting which they must have learned from one master. Birtacha and Zacharioudakis (here, vol. I) have pointed out the many similarities in the execution of the profile heads, the ears, the eyes and the contours. The same contours, with the stroke broken above the curve of the nose, are found on the preserved profile of one of the 'Ladies' (Doumas 1992, fig. 9). Both 'Ladies' have strokes in the whites of their eyes, in their case red, to indicate age, the only figures from Thera to have them, apart from the Xeste 3 paintings (which include the male figures from Room 3b (Doumas 1992, figs. 109-115). The use of colour by the Xeste 3 figure painters and those of the House of the Ladies follows the same system: details of the ears are rendered in the same pink pigment used for the lips, nipples, fingernails and toenails, and on the cheeks of the 'Ladies'. It is applied occasionally to give a pinkish tinge to the inside of the hands and the soles of the feet. This is visible on the red-haired girl (Doumas 1992, fig. 130) (Pl. 10), the girl in pain (Doumas 1992, figs. 105-106), and the figures from the House of the Ladies (Doumas 1992, figs. 11-12). A special feature in common is the use of two toes to distinguish the back outer foot from the front inner foot, which is represented with the usual single toe. In Xeste 3 it can be seen on the girl in pain (the feet of the other figures are not well enough preserved), and on the bending 'Lady'. This double-toed outer foot is most likely a remnant in Theran tradition of their training by the Minoans. Foreshortened outer feet with all five toes are rendered in the Knossos Procession fresco (Evans 1928, 723, fig. 450).

The differences between the individual Xeste 3 painters can best be seen in details of the facial renderings (Figs. 5-12). Specifically:

     the shapes of the eyes and brows and their locations in relation to the ear;

     the rendering of eyelashes and hairs of the brow or their omission;

     the manner of applying blue strokes or shapes in the eyes;

     the drawing of the ears where the colour is preserved;

     the rendering of the shaved areas in front of the ear, especially nature of the hair strokes and how they are lined up.

These 'Morellian' details represent more than just the different motor habits of the artists; they represent the differences in their conceptions of the features they are painting. The younger crocus gatherer on the east wall (Fig. 6) has the most hirsute eyebrow and lashes, matched only by the wounded girl in the 'lustral basin' (Fig. 11), who has very different blue eyestrokes. Her companion (Fig. 5) has the only ear rendered with a line of dots. The girl facing the goddess (Fig. 7) is the only adolescent whose hair curls are not rendered with incisions.

In Xeste 3, the individual figure artists appear to be in the process of learning to represent figures in action. They have all been taught the same formula for rendering hands in foreshortened positions: either thumb and four bent fingers, seen from back or front, for holding objects, or thumb and two fingers for grasping small objects or dropping a crocus. Lyvia Morgan (this volume) deals expertly with the Theran artists' placement of figures in space and experimentation with viewpoint. In Xeste 3, each painter appears to have designed his own mobile figure. The artists seem to be inventing on the spot. These well-schooled painters were confident enough to attempt more than what they had already mastered. Like the young Euphronios, they often encountered difficulties:

The younger crocus picker (Doumas 1992, fig. 120) raises one leg drastically in her ascent of the hill, with the result that her right thigh appears too short.

The artist who painted her companion (Doumas 1992, fig. 118) has attempted an even more difficult pose: the whole body frontal, to make the transition between the head facing the right and the feet facing left. The artist has tried to depict her squatting with foreshortened knees; the result is odd dwarf-like proportions. The frontality of the chest allowed the artist to show both breasts (Doumas 1992, fig. 118), as pointed out by N. Marinatos (1993, 205). He has rendered their lower outline and the separation between them in pink (partially preserved) but placed it much too low to relate to the two nipples.

The artist of the red-haired girl (Doumas 1992, fig. 130) (Pl. 10) has attempted to show her left arm drawn back with her foreshortened hand (only two fingers) supporting the basket. But in this position the basket overlapped some of her hair, which had already been incised and painted. He wiped off the paint, but his miscalculation remained visible.

The artist of the goddess (Doumas 1992, fig. 122) (Pl. 12) has depicted her in an elegant relaxed position, with her left foot resting casually on a higher part of the platform (see Porter this volume, fig. 11 for a reconstruction). The painter has skilfully negotiated the intricacy of her flounced skirt in that position. He renders as well a unique detail of long hair visible between her left arm and body. He may well have been the master painter.

The most difficult task of all the figure painting was the complex position of the young woman in pain in the 'lustral basin' (Doumas 1992, fig. 105). She is hunched over, with her right leg presumablyraised and supported by her left leg, which is vertical. We can conclude this by the artist's use of two toes to distinguish the outer foot from the inner foot, which has only one toe. As stated above, the same convention was employed in the House of the Ladies, along with the use of pink on the soles of the feet (Doumas 1992, figs. 11-12). Her right arm and hand extend down in front of her wounded right foot to drop the crocus flower, still in the air, depicted at the right of her foot. This also directs the viewer's attention to the blood spurting from her foot. The U-shaped ankle is depicted in pink, and the pink on the sole of her foot continues to the edge of the frontmost flap of her overskirt beneath the tassel of her sleeve. This indicates that the flap overlaps the back contour of her leg, which is nor delineated. The crossed-leg position (there is no parallel from the Bronze Age; I know of none before the Greek Classical period) created enormous difficulties in the depiction of the intricate over-skirt with its triplets of vertical flaps descending from the patterned blue belt. The painter has persevered to delineate it with logic and consistency, if not with clarity.

In Morgan's opinion, the facial expression of the figure does not confirm that the gesture of clapping her hand against her forehead denotes pain (Morgan this volume). What does confirm it is the extremely upraised iris of her eye, which is like that of the boxing boy on the left in the fresco from Beta 1 (Doumas 1992, fig. 81). He is also in pain, as indicated by the lighter colour of his face. His greater importance in the scene is signified by his jewellery, which his opponent lacks. He, like the young woman, stands for an initiate. In both cases the element of pain must have had major significance as part of the initiation. The pain incurred from her slight wound in the context of crocus gathering, which surrounds only the initiate, surely refers to the shedding of hymenal blood, over which the goddess presides.

The style of these female figure painters from Xeste 3 and the House of the Ladies differs greatly from that of the free brush-painters who worked in Delta 2. The figure artists must have practised hard to develop the precision of the fine contour lines of their figures. The individual figures in motion are executed carefully and deliberately, and suggest preliminary practice work on the part of the apprentices in preparation for executing their fresco work. The extraordinary accuracy with which the jewellery and clothing are depicted would also have required preparatory studies. These must have been carried out under the supervision of the master painter, with the specific requirements of the Xeste 3 commission in mind. The strictness of his schooling has not prevented the individual Theran artists from practising their own skills and painting in their own individual manner.

Christos Boulotis presented at this Symposium a persuasive summation of evidence for organised 'workshops' of wall painters functioning in master-apprentice relationships in all the major Aegean centres. The requirements of fresco painting would have imposed certain special conditions on the artists beyond that of the time limitations. Mural painting had to be executed at the site, using valuable materials. Except for the production of tripod 'offering tables', their work could not be done in 'shops'. For this reason, the term 'school' seems preferable. The artists surely did not practise with costly pigments on pure lime plaster. The two practice sketches incised in plaster published by Televantou (1987; this volume, fig. 1) suggest a scarcity of practice surfaces. Master artists would have developed and perfected their art in the course of executing their commissions. Apprentices would have learned basic skills by drawing and painting on humbler materials, perhaps on stone or pottery fragments, like those used by Egyptian artists (Peck 1978, 30-32). Apprentice artists learn by repeatedly copying the master's work until he approves it. As a result, the ancient apprentice painters would have approached their work with a very different 'mindset' from that of modern painters. Their task was to execute what they were trained to do in a consistent manner.

The smaller details allow us to distinguish the individual artists, each with his own mental picture of what he is painting, and they allow us to see the apprenticeship system at work in the entire body of Theran painting. Televantou (this volume) has pointed out the differences in facial features of the three older women from Xeste 3 (Doumas 1992, figs. 131-134) (Pl. 4) who represent a different 'school' of figure artists, as she has stated. The two 'Ladies' can be distinguished better on the basis of the renderings of the garments, since different portions of their heads are preserved. Although the artist of the woman bending over has deliberately varied her flounced garment from the one she is holding, they are quite similar, both with extraordinary details of fringed threads lined up with different colours of the woven horizontal threads that extend beyond the vertical borders. These are not so well articulated by the other artist. The three artists of the monkeys from Beta 6 (Doumas 1992 figs. 87-89) have three different mental pictures of the brown areas on the face and the rendering or lack of rendering of the white eye ring. Even the painters of the ikria of the West House can be distinguished from one another: only one artist who painted the half ikrion can be recognised as painting a second one (Doumas 1992, 42, figs. 49 and 50 right), which he executed with great consistency.

The remarkable degree to which the Theran artists exhibit signs of learning and development may be due to the unusual preservation of the frescoes. But it also suggests a youthful stage of the painting tradition there. This may be laid to the earlier seismic destruction, and the necessary rebuilding that was undertaken immediately after. It may have required the local artists to recruit and train unusual numbers of new painters. Did it also provide the opportunity for the formation of the distinctive Theran style?

APPENDIX: CORRECTIONS TO 'YOUNTH AND AGE IN THE THERA FRESCOES' 

I take this opportunity to update my article (Davis 1986), which was written when I had not seen the goddess, and had had only brief looks at some of the figures from Xeste 3 while they were still undergoing restoration. The article contained two errors of judgement that call for correction and comment. These were the mistakes in assigning one of the crocus gatherers (Doumas 1992, fig. 120) to stage 1, when she belongs to stage 3. The other was the misunderstanding of the blue areas in front of the ear (Figs. 5-9) as ornaments, rather than shaved areas, as Morgan (this volume) and Laffineur (this volume) have pointed out. The correction of both of these mistakes has interesting implications for Theran social practices. The accompanying table (Table 1) sums up the stages of youth that I initially proposed, with corrections and adjustments required by the publication of the frescoes incorporated. These include an additional lock at stage 2, which we now can recognise with the help of the publication of the goddess.

Doumas (this volume) has proposed a different sequence of age-grade initiations. As he has stated, haircutting practices in ancient Thera were different for male and female children at the later stages. This is clear from the new evidence of the three male youths from Room 3b, the anteroom to the 'lustral basin' (Doumas 1992, figs. 109-115). This table contains the sequence as I see it now for females. I have retained the references to male figures at the earlier stages, since their appearances may parallel those of the females.

In my table, descriptions of the changes in appearance of the hair of the young people at each stage are given, with examples cited. Stage 3 may have involved sub-phases. The dotted lines between them should be considered as representing the onset of new hair growth or the cutting of locks that inaugurated these changes. These presumably involved coming-of-age-rituals.

My mistake in placing the young crocus gatherer (Doumas 1992, figs. 120-121) in the first stage of hair growth resulted from having seen the figure out of context and at an early stage of restoration. The publication of the full scene on the east wall (Doumas 1992, fig. 116) (Pl. 8) reveals that she has the same scale as her companion and the other two girls who participate in the ritual on the north wall. While the other three girls have had time for their hair to grow into short curls, the short black hairs depicted on her blue scalp, unique so far on Thera, indicate that her hair is just beginning to grow. She too is at stage 3, but looks different because she has undergone the lock cutting and cessation of head shaving more recently than they have. So all four girls who participate in the crocus gathering scene are recent initiates.

The realisation that all four girls, the only human figures depicted in the crocus gathering, are recent initiates contributes new evidence that allows us to identify with greater precision the function of Room 3a on the first storey. It must have been the site of the puberty ritual itself, the major rite of passage from childhood to womanhood and its attendant ritual hair cutting. It must have taken place at the onset of the physiognomic changes that would eventually result in the menarche. As N. Marinatos (1993, 204-205) has pointed out, two of the girls are represented with some breast development: the red-haired girl (Doumas 1992, fig. 130) (Pl. 10) and the girl whose chest is frontal (Doumas 1992, fig. 118). The other two girls, including the one who has most recently undergone the ceremony and one who has spent some time growing her hair (Doumas 1992, fig. 124), have no sign of breast development and no indication of nipples.

The actual cutting of the hair may have taken place here or elsewhere, perhaps in Room 9, but the attendant rituals that celebrated the onset of puberty must have taken place in Room 3a. Its connection with the larger space of Room 3 via the polythyron would have allowed the presentation of the initiate in her new appearance to a wider audience. The depiction of a younger girl who had just been initiated suggests that each girl was initiated individually.

The ritual of gathering crocus flowers and offering saffron to the goddess must have been an annual event that took place in late November or December. It was not an initiation, and was not actually restricted to the new initiates. One young woman in the adyton (Doumas 1992, fig. 105) is depicted as taking part: she is the only figure surrounded by landscape with crocus growing, and she has dropped a just-plucked crocus flower that is falling beneath her wounded foot. One of the older women depicted in Room 3b (Doumas 1992, fig. 131) holds a basket like those of the crocus gatherers. It is probable that all adult females participated in what must have been a major harvest festival for the ancient Therans. The representation of the festival in the fresco with only recent initiates taking part emphasises the initiation itself, which would have allowed them to join the women.

A second figure, the young girl painted in the 'lustral basin', may also be related to the initiation (Doumas 1992, fig. 108). She is the youngest of the females depicted in Xeste 3. In my original article, I overlooked the short but very wide curl of hair at her forehead which fans out at the end in separate strands. This is a new lock, different from the narrow forehead lock of stage 1, which grew from the crown of the head. It is poorly preserved in the painting but visible to the right of the wide lock. The wide lock is prominent on the goddess (Doumas 1992, fig. 126) (Pl. 13) and defined by an incision. The goddess wears it along with all the other childhood locks, except for the right sidelock, which is not represented, presumably because the goddess is seen from the left. The childhood locks of the goddess look exactly like those of the girl: two short locks on the crown curling backward.

Similar wide locks are also worn by the boxing boys from House Beta (Doumas 1992, fig. 81), but they lack the two extra curls at the crown of the head. Either they are at an earlier stage, or the rendering of a different group of artists has omitted them, or boys did not wear such locks. The 'priestess' from the West House (Doumas 1992, fig. 25) is the only older child who lacks the wide lock. Her coiffure is difficult to understand, perhaps because of the inexperience of the artist. Is the loop on the centre of her head between the forelock and the back lock the painter's way of suggesting a right side-lock which continues behind her neck, like those of the right boxer? If so, she also lacks the two short locks on the crown. The scale and proportions of the girl depicted in the 'lustral basin', compared with those of the other children at stage 2, indicate that she is older, closer to the end of childhood. She may be about to be initiated, at which time all her locks of childhood will be removed, and her appearance will be similar to that of the youngest initiate (Doumas 1992, fig. 120).

The identification of Room 3a of Xeste 3 as the place where the major rite of passage of young girls at adolescence was conducted does not preclude its use for the other age-grade initiations. It could have served as the place where all of the younger children underwent the hair cutting and ceremonies that are implied by the changes in their appearance. Geraldine Gesell's analysis of the potential of the architecture of Xeste 3 to accommodate different rites is persuasive (Gesell this volume). But the saffron gathering fresco signals the female puberty ritual as the primary purpose of the room.

The more precise evidence for the function of the first storey of Room 3a of Xeste 3 brings it even closer to that of the Artemis sanctuary at Brauron, where wild crocus still grows today. The practices at Brauron in the Classical period have been especially well elucidated by Sourvinou-Inwood (1988). After careful analyses of both the textual and the pictorial evidence, Sourvinou-Inwood has concluded that Athenian girls were sequestered there for probably one year where they served as άρκτοι, or she-bears. She concluded that most of the girls were nearer the ideal age of ten by their completion of the άρκτεια, and that the rites served as a transition from childhood to the onset of a period of maturation that culminated in the menarche. This is exactly the age suggested by the depictions of the initiates in the saffron gathering fresco. The Athenian girls celebrated the completion of their service at the festival of the Brauronia, in a ritual of shedding the κροκωτός, the saffron-dyed garment worn while they were in service.

The question arises of whether the Thera girls, too, lived at Xeste 3 before their initiation. If they did, perhaps the young girl with the elaborate mantle (a Bronze Age κροκωτός?) exemplifies them. The answer must await the completion of the excavation of Xeste 3, and the evaluation of all the finds. The important analysis of the pottery from the building by Papagiannopoulou (1995) clearly shows the unusual character of the building. The lack of cooking pots and the unusual number of pouring vessels, including three types unique on Thera, suggests only ceremonies occurred there. But the large number of rooms still being discovered to the west remains to be explained.

That the blue areas in front of the ears, exclusive to the young girls and the goddess of the crocus gathering, represent shaved areas is clear. The clinching evidence is provided by the depiction of the blue-eyed girl (Fig. 9), in which the strokes representing emerging hair are red, consistent with the colour of her hair. The three girls with short curly locks have continued to shave only this area, while all other hair shaving has ceased. The goddess retains this feature along with the rest of the locks of childhood, presumably as one of the insignia of youth, in addition to her full growth of hair. This shaving is the last remnant of youth, but when did it stop?

The two young women with fully grown hair depicted in the 'lustral basin' (Doumas 1992, figs. 102, 105) appear to have achieved maturity, from their long hair and developed breasts. Hair strands replace the shaved blue of the adolescent or pre-adolescent girls. The girl with the necklace has a more luxuriant growth in front of her ear than the girl in pain, whose short wispy strands suggest a more recent change. I had originally interpreted the figures as symbolic of an initiation related to marriage. The question is: have they just ceased shaving or have they grown long locks in front of the ear that have just been cut?

The rhyton bearer from the Knossos Procession fresco has long hair, blue strokes in his eye, and a blue-painted 'sideburn' shaped like those of the adolescent girls, but with no strokes suggesting emerging hairs. Evans (1928, 706, fig. 442A-B, pl. XII) identified it as a "silver ear ornament". This indicates that in Crete, the 'shaved sideburn' was maintained for some years until the rest of the hair was grown. If so, the two mature women depicted in the 'lustral basin' may be only slightly older than he is, having just recently ceased shaving that area.

The special emphasis on the 'shaved sideburn' of the Theran initiates must relate to the prominent hair lock (occasionally two) in front of the ear in Minoan art of the neopalatial period, and later on from the Greek mainland. Its depiction is so far lacking on Thera. This raises questions about whether Theran hair cutting and initiation practices differed from those of Crete.

The prominent hair lock in front of the ear is found in Minoan representations of both male and female figures. It is especially emphasised in the Knossos miniature frescoes (Evans 1930, 46-80, col. pls. XVI-XVIII). Although the figures of the crowds witnessing the events are represented in what Evans rightly called a "short-hand" technique, heads and necks minimally sketched over the areas of skin colour, every figure seems to have had this lock depicted. Those of the 'Sacred Grove and Dance' (Evans 1930, col. pl. XVIII) have mostly lost their black pigment, which is better preserved on the female spectators. The better preserved locks of the spectators of the 'Grandstand' scene (Evans 1930, col. pl. XVI) are worn by what seem to be young boys with topknots. The female figures in positions of honour near the 'tripartite shrine' have longer locks in front of their ears. Are they young women waiting for the male figures filing in from the other painting in anticipation of the group marriage?

Other Minoan figures have even longer locks in front of their ears: the 'Prince with the Feather Crown' (Evans 1928, frontispiece, fig. 509), the 'Dancing Woman' from the 'Queen's Megaron' (Evans 1930, fig. 40), and bull vaulters who appear to be pre-adolescent (Evans 1930, figs. 143-145, 148, pl. XXI), all from Knossos; the older youth on the 'Chieftain Cup' from Ayia Triada (Marinatos and Hirmer 1960, pls. 100, 102), and votive figures from the neopalatial period (Verlinden 1984, 94, pls. 8:23, 10:24, 12:28, 16:33). Are they all youths who will cut these locks at marriage? The long ear lock is also prominent on the older women of the Mycenaean procession frescoes (Immerwahr 1990, 114-119). Are they older priestesses who never married? The three adult women from outside the crocus gathering scene in Xeste 3 (Doumas 1992, figs. 131-134) (Pl. 4) have no hair lock, and neither do the old women from the House of the Ladies. Perhaps they are not virgin priestesses.

Did Theran rites of passage and hair cutting differ from those of the Minoans? Did the Therans grow such locks? Were Theran marriage customs different from those of Crete? Are we dealing with figures of different classes, on Crete as well as on Thera? These questions raised by the shaved 'sideburns' of Theran adolescent girls are difficult to resolve.

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