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

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2.2 The Minoan culture and problems of interpretation

Terminology

The term Minoan refers to a number of different things depending upon its use, for example; chronological period, style of architecture or geological event. I define the Minoan culture area as that area which is predominantly influenced by or solely represented by the culture centred on Crete in the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods (see figures 1.3, 2.1 and 2.2). Initially this culture area was limited geographically by Crete , but from an early period there were links with other groups (Hägg and Marinatos 1984; Wiener 1990) . The culture expanded its influence through trade and contact to include other islands in the Aegean that were part of the Cycladic culture area. Later this influence started to wane and towards the nadir of the culture it in turn was heavily influenced by the mainland or Helladic culture area. These culture areas are therefore flexible and very hard to represent physically on a map. There are no fixed boundaries between them and because of the nature of the disparate settling of the land in this period there are large areas where we have evidence of no cultural group. This complication is of great importance as it is reflected in the separate chronologies that have built up for these three culture areas: Minoan, Helladic and Cycladic. Each is largely based on the pottery seriation of that group and a break or change in one is not necessarily reflected in the other chronologies. Often the breaks in the chronologies are linked to destruction horizons. The Minoan eruption may have been of such magnitude that it affected all the culture groups possibly creating a unique concordance between them.

Figure 2. 1 Map illustrating the major Late Bronze Age sites (in italics) and islands of the Aegean • 

Textual and iconographic sources

The period of time in question is on the cusp of recorded history; the Minoans used writing for everyday administrative functions rather than story telling and the clay tablets that they inscribed on were largely designed as temporary dockets rather than permanent records to be kept. The script in use at the time of the eruption, Linear A, is still undeciphered and the later Linear B, which has been deciphered, was used during the Mycenaean hegemony when organisational structures may have changed. The earliest narrative works in the area are those of Homer, which have been ascribed to the 8 th century BC (Janko 1982) and whilst there are elements of the stories which provide some insights it is difficult to use them to form the basis for a qualitative study of the earlier period (Kirk 1985) . The work of the Classical authors is in my opinion largely irrelevant to this discussion. Whilst some elements, such as technological details, may be of worth, to use the stories as the basis for recorded history is taking them too far. Many Classical authors were working over a thousand years after the event and it would be similar to a writer now giving an opinion on Anglo Saxon Britain largely based upon the works of wandering Medieval jongleurs.

Textual sources from other cultures such as the Amarna letters or the Mari Archive record details of high level contact and gift exchange. Some well documented tomb paintings from Egypt would actually seem to demonstrate the moment of gift exchange between Egyptians and a group called the Keftiu who are likely to have been Minoans (Wachsmann 1987; Matthäus 1995; Rehak 1998) . Unfortunately the rare examples of Egyptian artefacts within Minoan cultural deposits and vice-versa have become highly charged because of their link to a 'solid' chronology (see discussion on chronology for details).

Figure 2. 2 Major Late Minoan sites on Crete . Land over 500 m in dark grey.

1. Vrysses, 2. Chania, 3. Stavromenos, 4. Kamares, 5. Agia Triada, 6. Phaistos, 7. Kommos, 8. Pitsidia, 9. Tylisos, 10. Poros, 11. Prasa, 12. Amnisos, 13. Knossos , 14. Juktas, 15. Archanes, 16. Vathypetro, 17. Galatas, 18. Nirou Chani, 19. Mallia, 20. Myrtos Pyrgos, 21. Priniaktikos Pirgos, 22. Gournia, 23. Vasiliki, 24. Pseira, 25. Mochlos, 26. Zou, 27. Palaikastro, 28. Zakros.

•  Initial discovery and incipient bias

The Minoan civilisation is a relatively recent rediscovery; the initial archaeological reconstruction of this culture was largely the work of one man, Sir Arthur Evans, and the product of his excavations at Knossos . This fact has biased much of the later work carried out on the culture as new sites and ideas fit into or modify the concepts that he laid out in his excavation reports (Evans 1921-36) .

Evans' initial excavations at Knossos were undertaken without a chronological framework to hang upon. It has to be admitted that his work was immense; the dedication which he showed and the insight into such a complex site have been listed elsewhere (Horwitz 1981; Brown 1993; Momigliano 1996) . Evans was creating a culture almost from nothing and he needed to describe and give life to the culture that he was excavating. In many ways this became as much a Victorian/Edwardian construct of an ideal society as it was based in fact (Bintliff 1984; MacGillivray 2000) . It could be supposed that Evans saw in this society, which was older than the Argive Society of the Mycenaeans, the Golden Age of Classical mythology and he endowed it with that ethos. The lithe body of the bull leapers reflects the British sporting aesthete and the Thalassocracy of Minos (see section 2.5.2.2) is reflected in the navy of England and the Empire. The pottery system defined by Evans was based upon the Three Age system (Renfrew and Bahn 1996, p25) first advocated by Thomsen and was split into the Early, Middle and Late with sub-divisions of periods I, II and III . This worked initially but as other sites were excavated it became increasingly unwieldy and the tinkering that the system has undergone has made the pottery seriation almost unreadable by a non-expert. As in any other discipline, however, there are schools of thought or new ideas that come along for each generation which challenge the accepted views. This increase in complexity has been matched by an increase in complexity of the skills and techniques used in excavation creating a plethora of information for the Minoan period.

The result of this growth in complexity means that conclusions drawn from excavation should always be assessed in terms of the time that the site was excavated. As an example Seager excavated Pseria in the 1900's and found no evidence of tephra (Seager 1910) . More recent excavations have found tephra deposits which are truncated by Seager's excavations (e.g. Soles and Davaras 1990, p91-92) . If a modern excavation that had conducted soil-sampling processes and was aware of the interest in tephra had failed to find any evidence then this could be taken as a null result, the 1900 excavation should not. The same could be said to be true for building collapse and evidence for earthquake damage. Much of this evidence may have been regarded as overburden and removed. Fotou in her re-analysis of Hall's excavations at Gournia states how rooms were cleared - a workman would dig down until a floor layer was reached and then they would excavate sideways until walls were met (Fotou 1993) .

There are a number of synthesis works on Minoan culture that bring together the relevant traits but several of the broad themes can be stated here (Castleden 1990; Dickinson 1994; Rehak and Younger 1998) . The culture was a hierarchical, complex society based on a redistributive system (Cherry 1983; Rehak and Younger 1998) . The redistribution was based around a hierarchy of sites centred on the main palace sites. Writing was used for administrative purposes and the storage and exchange of goods was formalised. There was a distinctive style and tradition of both art and architecture. The redistribution system encouraged craft specialisation to take place. Some of the raw materials for this craft production were acquired through an interlinked network of international trade. The civilisation probably had many aspects that would be recognised by Cretans up to the beginning of the 20th century.

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