A Comparative Perspective on Minoan Urbanism

Urban settlements are often presented as a prominent feature of Bronze Age Crete (McEnroe 2010). And yet, summarizing what is actually known about Minoan towns is much more challenging than one would expect, especially for non-palatial settlements. Many studies are narrowly focused and often take one urban element out of context in all communities (e.g. villas, classification of houses, street system, etc.), hence undermining an understanding of the urban environment as a whole. Furthermore, research on Minoan urban contexts has long been characterized by a strong focus on polite or palatial architecture and very specific urban features related to it (such as the so-called west courts, raised walks, theatral areas, etc.), while most case-studies have often had a rather limited dataset. There are clearly exceptions but, to date, our knowledge of Minoan urban settlements is partly built on a large collection of heterogeneous and disparate information. As already noted some fifteen years ago, the ‘nature and character’ of urban settlements ‘has seen much less discussion, particularly at a generalized level’ (Branigan 2001a: vii; but see chapters 7 and 9). Of course, this situation is also inextricably linked to the nature of our datasets. Research is clearly constrained by the low quality of work in the initial decades of Minoan archaeology when somany of the larger exposures of townscapes on the island were made. And yet, for more than a century now, the archaeology of Bronze Age Crete has thrived:many excavations initiated at the beginning of the twentieth century have either continued or been revived, providing descriptions of numerous settlements of various sizes; new projects have unearthed fascinating buildings and sites; and many regions of the island have now been systematically surveyed. As a consequence, Minoan archaeologists have at their disposal a solid and varied dataset. Of course, sampling issues do exist. Firstly, remains of Neopalatial urban settlements clearly outnumber those of other periods.

Understanding Minoan In-House Relationships on Late Bronze Age Crete

Houses, space, and architecture are ways through which identities and social relations are enacted and performed; they produce and support practices that themselves are needed to reproduce or generate identities and interpersonal associations. As archaeologists, we are especially interested in the ways static structures can be used to identify ever-changing social relations; and this chapter is an attempt to approach the architectural configurations and spatial organization of larger residential complexes of Minoan Crete more socially and to see what structured these (Ensor 2013). My aim is to advance our knowledge on the micro-scale of proximate interactions, in other words what the evidence is for in-house relationships. As such it may help in an eventual peopling of the past. For a house to become a home, more than an architectural form is needed. Hence the linkage of house and household and the need for a house to become a social unit, the place of reproduction, socialization, and the setting of primary social and economic dealings. In this sense, the house as a home is also a nexus of social and economic activities and hence achieves a political importance since its roles in production and consumption are pivotal to the amalgamated whole which is the community. He who rules the home, rules the community. The house is the society. Throughout the different periods of Minoan civilixation, houses are given great prominence and many of them are striking architectural creations, surprising because of their size, design, elaboration, and decoration, clear signs of the significance of houses in interpersonal relationships. They are unmistakably more than physical residences; they are also transcendent categories with a life of their own (Bloch 2010: 156–7). Houses stand for social groups and are symbolic foci, something also underlined by J. D. Schloen (2007) in his monograph The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East.

Introduction—Minoan Built Environment: Past Studies, Recent Perspectives, and Future Challenges

Architecture and urbanism have been of constant interest to Minoan archaeologists since the beginning of the twentieth century. While there is some scholarly bias to this, with the field deeply affected by Sir Arthur Evans’s focus on the monumental architecture of Knossos, Minoan Crete continues to yield abundant evidence for a substantial built environment. Focusing on urban and architectural remains creates a strong bias in favour of one block of time, the Neopalatial period, which produced the largest amount of wellpreserved settlements and buildings. Yet, in general, the evidence we now have on the Minoan built environment is an undeniable resource, one that continues to grow thanks to ongoing studies of pre-existing remains as well as new excavation and survey projects. As is clear in Evans’s magnum opus, The Palace of Minos at Knossos, the large-scale excavations typical of the dawn of the last century were heavily directed towards the urban cores of the largest Minoan sites (e.g. Boyd Hawes et al. 1908; Hutchinson 1950). The bulk of what we know about the Minoan built environment comes from the first half of the twentieth century, initially through the intensive work of the foreign schools at Malia, Phaistos, Palaikastro, Gournia, Mochlos, and Pseira, later joined by countless excavations by Greek archaeologists. Yet, synthetic treatments really only began with the work of James Walter Graham, in the form of numerous papers published in the American Journal of Archaeology (see Letesson 2009 for a detailed review), and especially his Palaces of Crete (Graham 1962). Nonetheless, his comparative analyses, which also dealt with non-palatial buildings, were largely focused on polite architecture. With a particular interest in form and function, he built on Evans’s insights to be the first to identify, across a large sample of buildings, recurring architectural patterns in the Minoan built environment (e.g. Piano Nobile, residential quarters, banquet halls). His studies also included an innovative quantitative component, emphasizing the existence of a unit of length that builders would have used to lay out the palaces and some of the so-called ‘villas’.

Processes and Patterns at the Macro-Scale: Crete and Beyond

Zooming out, we first reach the various regions that compose Crete (e.g. west Crete, Mesara, north-central Crete, Malia-Lasithi zone, Mirabello Bay area, east Crete) and then the whole island itself. This is the macro-scale where settlement patterns can be observed and ‘which may see low-level exchange, competition, close affiliations; a whole range of potential scenarios, including “states”’ (Knappett 2012: 395). Further out, we might speak of the global scale, that of the supra-regional, with connections beyond the island to the Cyclades, Asia Minor, the Greek mainland, and so on. Although we have a general idea of how settlement patterns evolved during the Cretan Bronze Age (Driessen 2001; see also Bevan 2010 for an up-to-date synthesis), limitations at the micro- and meso-scale clearly also constrain our understanding of the macro-scale. Nevertheless, starting with Sir Arthur Evans (1928: 60–92), who was particularly interested in roads and how they connected specific settlements both in central and east Crete to support his view of Knossian overarching power (see also Warren 1994: 189, n.3), an interest in broader regional dynamics and top-down approaches to sociopolitical complexity was always prominent in Aegean archaeology (Cherry 1984; Renfrew 1972; Renfrew and Cherry 1986). This focus on site hierarchies has motivated a broad range of studies, from comparative material culture analysis (e.g. Knappett 1999) to surface surveys and associated tests which provided invaluable information on road networks (e.g. Müller 1991; Tzedakis et al. 1989; Tzedakis et al. 1990) and settlement distribution (for extensive bibliography and synthesis, see Driessen 2001; Whitelaw 2012). Although recent surveys clearly increase the temporal and spatial resolution of our data sets (e.g. Haggis 2005; Watrous 2012; Whitelaw, Bredaki, and Vasilakis 2006–7), they still have considerable gaps. For example, compared to central and east Crete, relatively few sites have been identified in the west of the island. This problem was recently tackled by Bevan and Wilson (2013), who devised a model for exploring settlement locations, hierarchies, and interconnections despite our incomplete dataset (see also chapters 12 and 15).

Community Building/Building Community at Gournia

For more than a century Gournia has been one of the key sites for understanding Minoan urbanism. Excavations by Harriet Boyd Hawes (1901–4), Jeffrey Soles and Costis Davaras (1971, 1972, and 1979), an intensive archaeology survey by Costis Davaras and L. Vance Watrous (1992–4), cleaning operations by Watrous near the shore (2008 and 2009), and the current Gournia Excavation Project (hereafter GEP) also directed by Watrous (2010–present) have resulted in one of the most extensively explored Bronze Age towns in the Eastern Mediterranean (Hall 1912; Boyd Hawes et al. 1908; Watrous et al. 2012; Watrous et al. 2015). By the end of the Neopalatial period the excavated section of the town covered some 1.68 ha, consisting of a number of interdependent components, including approximately sixty-four houses, a small palace, harbour facilities, a 500 m2 plateia, and a cobblestone street system with a total length of more than half a kilometre (Gomrée 2013: 850). When we began our work with the GEP we assumed that we would simply add the new excavations to the existing plan by Boyd. However, we quickly discovered it was not possible to make the old plan fit with our new survey points. Moreover as we looked more closely at the old plan we discovered a number of other problems. We noticed that walls, rooms, and even entire buildings had been omitted. In addition, the straight lines of the earlier plan had the effect of regularizing the architecture and masked the chronological complexity of the site. We decided, therefore, to make a new GIS-based plan of the entire site. When combined with excavation data, our new architectural analysis provides a rich dataset, which is useful for both interisland and cross-cultural comparisons of urban development and change. This dataset also provides us with the opportunity to examine how the various components of the town interacted from the time of its foundation in the Early Minoan period through to its final use in the Late Minoan III period.

Architectural Energetics and Late Bronze Age Cretan Architecture: Measuring the Scale of Minoan Building Projects

It may appear to be asking too much of archaeological evidence to attempt an assessment of the scale of Minoan building projects, their impact on communities, or the role of the labour-time needed for the construction of various kinds of masonry. By taking a firmly materialist perspective, however, the present paper offers an exploration of some of the parameters at play in the production of Minoan architecture. Architectural energetics is a method that translates a building into the labourtime necessary for its construction, a value expressed in person-days or person-hours (abbreviated p-d and p-h). Estimations are based on standard units of time necessary to accomplish each task making up the architectural project: the procurement of raw materials, their transport, manufacture, and assembling. These are most generally expressed in volumes per hour per person, and referred to as ‘standard costs’, which are applied to the volumes of edifices and thus determine the labour-time necessary for their construction. The first assessments of the duration and manpower of ancient building projects mainly appeared in the form of subjective labour-time estimates triggered by romantic views of the grandeur of early civilizations (Andrews 1877; Humboldt 1816; Squier and Davis 1848; Stephens 1841; Webster 1997: 219). Around the middle of the twentieth century, a growing body of publications started to make use of such estimates in order to correlate the magnitude of building or agricultural projects with particular stages of sociopolitical organization (Adams 1975; Cook 1947; Cottrell 1955; Erasmus 1965; Heizer 1960, 1966; Kaplan 1963; White 1949, 1959). Among the most prominent figures of this early trend was C. J. Erasmus, who led a series of experiments that aimed to provide objective quantification of building costs (Erasmus 1965). From the 1970s onwards, largely connected with a renewed research agenda promoting scientific methods of data recovery and interpretation of the archaeological record, quantitative assessments of architectural projects flourished (Aaberg and Bonsignore 1975; Arnold and Ford 1980; Carmean 1991; Cheek 1986; Craig, Holmlund, and Clark 1998; Hard et al. 1999; Price 1982; Trigger 1990; Webster 1985; Webster and Kirker 1995).

Best Laid Plans: An Archaeology of Architectural Anomalies in Bronze Age Crete

Approaches to Minoan architecture (Graham 1962; Preziosi 1983; Hitchcock 2000; Shaw 2009, 2015; Letesson 2009; McEnroe 2010) have focused on its positive qualities, and since Evans’s excavations in the early years of the twentieth century the perceived modernity of Minoan architecture has been manifest both in scholarly discourse (Farnoux 1993; Schoep 2010: 222) and in popular representations in various media. Sophisticated, delightful, and above all planned—for while bull-leaping, labyrinths, and even kingship have all come under sceptical scrutiny, the existence of a Daedalus, at least as the personification of the creative genius of Minoan architecture, has been tacitly accepted. Any argument over the idea that Minoan architecture was designed, and furthermore designed with goals well appreciated today (e.g. maximizing light and air circulation, controlling for privacy, providing aesthetic pleasure) tends to be over the degree to which such planning can be demonstrated or proven from the existing evidence. That the goal itself, designed or planned building, was likely to have been desirable or effective is not usually questioned. Likewise, there are signs of civic or town planning, to the extent of a conceptual order imposed on the built form, implying an abstract higher level authority controlling private or lower level space, or at least the needs of the town superseding those of the individual structures within (Cunningham 2001; Buell 2014; see also chapter 9). And again, while we may disagree over the extent or penetration of such authority, or the appropriateness of the terminology, the idea that town planning might have had a deleterious effect on social bonding is rarely, if ever, considered. This is interesting, since in studies of architecture and town planning in modern times, at least since the 1960s and 1970s, it has become increasingly clear that planning towns and buildings is extremely hard and that even the best intentioned, most competent, and well-supported efforts not only often fail but regularly have the opposite effect as was intended.

Architecture: Building Dynamics at the Micro-Scale

In this section we tackle individual buildings. For domestic structures, the scale is that of the household, whereas for more monumental buildings—such as the palaces or the so-called ‘villas’—the association with a particular social group is still a matter of great debate, although the term ‘corporate group’ has been recently put forward (Driessen 2010; Schoep and Tomkins 2012). Bronze Age Crete presents an extremely rich architectural landscape; indeed, many buildings are sufficiently well preserved to allow detailed studies not only of their layout but also of their construction techniques (Devolder 2014; Shaw 2009). The discovery of the town of Akrotiri, buried under metres of tephra, has also provided plenty of evidence for architectural features—most notably perishable elements such as timber and roofing material—that have only left scant traces on Crete (Palyvou 2005; Tsakanika-Theochari 2006). Nevertheless, as for any other scale (see chapters 6 and 11), gaps in our archaeological data necessarily impede some analyses at the micro-scale. Often, in Minoan archaeology, the built environment has been partially recorded, and data collection varies from extremely detailed at some sites to almost non-existent for the large-scale early excavations of the beginning of the twentieth century. Furthermore, in terms of data resolution, Neopalatial architectural remains outweigh by far those of other periods, both in terms of quantity and quality. With the exception of the small settlements of Myrtos Fournou Korifi (Sanders 1990; Warren 1972) and Vasiliki (Zois 1992), Early Minoan architectural remains are relatively scarce. The situation is even more problematic for Middle Minoan buildings. Although Malia produced incredibly well-preserved remains of a Middle Bronze Age town, with buildings like Quartier Mu (Poursat 1978, 1996), the Bâtiment Dessenne (Devolder, Déderix, and Fadin 2012–13; Devolder, Caloi, and Gomrée forthcoming), the Agora (van Effenterre and van Effenterre 1969), and the Crypte Hypostyle (Amouretti 1970), we are not as fortunate with other sites. Middle Bronze Age remains were nonetheless excavated in many areas of the island, but later constructions often make detailed investigations almost impossible.

The Development and Character of Urban Communities in Prehistoric Crete in their Regional Context: A Preliminary Study

This chapter is a preliminary sketch of an approach to analysing Minoan and Aegean urbanism in the Bronze Age. It comprises two sections, the first an outline of urban development, focusing particularly on the Cretan evidence but situating that in its southern Aegean context, on the far western fringe of Eurasian Bronze Age urban societies. The second section is a preliminary comparative exploration of the Cretan data in the context of Bronze Age urbanism in the broader East Mediterranean and Near East. This is aimed at assessing whether, despite its geographical remove, Minoan urbanism shares significant characteristics with other examples of Bronze Age, institutionfocused urbanism, and whether the diversity of the latter, with their more extensive textual documentation, may potentially provide models which can help us to analyse the Cretan evidence. Today, urban status tends to rely on bureaucratic and legal definitions, which vary arbitrarily between jurisdictions (Roberts 1996). They are usually based on population size, sometimes on areal extent, but the underlying idea is that the size of the population interacting in a community has an impact on the nature of those interactions, with larger communities being more complex, with individuals, through spatial propinquity, being able to interact with greater numbers of other individuals, interact in more complicated ways, and require more organization and infrastructure to facilitate these interactions (Bairoch 1988; Mumford 1966). This is well documented through recent analyses that explore the intensification of social interactions in larger cities (not just more, but more per person), whether positively, as measured through, for example, GDP or innovation rates, or negatively, through crime rates (Bettencourt et al. 2007, 2010). Moving away from modern industrial and post-industrial contexts, viewed cross-culturally, it has long been established that the largest community in a culture provides a general index of overall cultural complexity, measured in a variety of ways (Carneiro 1967; Tatje and Naroll 1970; McNett 1970).

Dining on the Fringe? A Possible Minoan- Style Banquet Hall at Ayia Irini, Kea and the Minoanization of the Aegean Islands

Since its excavation by John Caskey and the University of Cincinnati from 1960 to 1976, Ayia Irini has served as one of the principal catalysts for investigations into the spread of Minoan culture throughout the Aegean in the later Middle and early Late Bronze Age (Fig. 14.1). Indeed, the abundance, concentration, and range of ceramic, architectural, iconographic, technological, and administrative evidence at the site that was inspired by, adapted, and/or adopted from the Cretan cultural package suggests that it functioned as one of the key nodes in the complex web of exchange networks that facilitated the dissemination of non-local traits across the region throughout this period (Abell 2014; Berg 2006, 2007; Davis 1979; Davis and Gorogianni 2008; Dietz 1998; Graziadio 1998; Knappett and Nikolakopoulou 2005; Knappett, Evans, and Rivers 2008; Knappett 2011; Nikolakopoulou 2007; Papagiannopoulou 1991; Schofield 1982a, 1982b, 1983, 1984a). Despite the quantity, quality, and variety of such evidence at Ayia Irini, however, only a single structure in the settlement, House A, has been hitherto recognized as betraying any indication of Minoan architectural influence (e.g. Berg 2007: 114; Cummer 1980; Cummer and Schofield 1984; Hitchcock 1998: 173; Letesson 2009: 298–303; Whitelaw 2005: 56). Currently located in the south-east quadrant of the site, though originally probably closer to its centre if changes in sea level are taken into account (Caskey 1962: 266, 278; 1964: 321; 1966: 365; 1971: 362), House A underwent a series of remodellings over the course of the Late Minoan IA through LM II periods (Cummer and Schofield 1984: 30–5; or Periods VI and VII in Caskey’s local pottery terminology), the end result of which produced an interesting blend of local and Minoanizing features.