Chapter 2. Earth: The Minoan eruption in its archaeological landscape

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2.1 Introduction

It has been proposed that the eruption of Santorini volcano in the Aegean Sea was responsible in the Late Bronze Age for a series of destruction horizons on the nearby island of Crete (e.g. Marinatos 1939; Luce 1969; Page 1970; Pichler and Schiering 1977) . Much research has been conducted on this question and the proposition has fallen in and out of favour (Kaloyeropoulou 1971; Doumas 1978; Doumas 1980; Hardy et al. 1990a; Hardy et al. 1990b; Hardy and Renfrew 1990; Driessen and Macdonald 1997) . The purpose of this work is to bring together the results of disparate strands of research across many disciplines to examine in-depth the principal possible causes of destruction: tephra fallout, and tsunami inundation. There are two main areas of research that can provide this data: archaeology and volcanology. This chapter will concentrate on the archaeological data whilst chapter 3 will look at the volcanological research that has taken place on Santorini.

To assess the archaeological data set it first needs to be put in context; what are the traits of the culture under consideration, when and where did it exist and what was its relationship with other cultures in existence at the time? This chapter will focus on these issues and then look in greater depth at three particular aspects of the Minoan culture that would have been most at risk from the eruption:

•  Minoan buildings

•  The coastal littoral

•  Crops and subsistence

To put this study in perspective the following facts should be realised. The eruption event took place approximately 3,500 years ago. The size of the eruption is open to interpretation (see chapter 3) but it is acknowledged to have been one of the largest on the planet during the last 10,000 years (Newhall and Self 1982) . As well as direct effects, most evident at the site of Akrotiri on Santorini, it may well have produced by-products or created secondary environmental effects which affected a larger area. The archaeological evidence for its impact is based upon excavation of sites from cultures that had largely disappeared from our knowledge and were only rediscovered approximately 100 years ago. No site from that period of time under consideration has been excavated in its entirety and no site outside Santorini has been excavated with the specific purpose of assessing this volcanic impact. Any evidence is spread across both the land and sea therefore hindering a coherent pattern of deposition. The eruption is securely dated in the mid 2nd millennium BC, but a precise date that allows a close-historical analysis is currently a problem because the eruption occurs at a period in time for which 14 C dating has inherent difficulty, leading to differences of interpretation (Manning 1990; Warren 1990; Baillie 1995, chapter 7; Manning 1999) .

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