Minoan Architecture and Urbanism

Nearly 4,000 years ago some of the very earliest towns of Europe appeared on the Mediterranean island of Crete. In this book we offer new insights into these ancient palaces and towns, as a contribution to a broader understanding of the diverse ways in which humans have made and used ancient built environments.

Minoan Crete is rightly famous for its idiosyncratic architecture, as well as its palaces and towns such as Knossos, Malia, Gournia, and Palaikastro. Indeed, these are often described as the first urban settlements of Bronze Age Europe. However, we still know relatively little about the dynamics of these early urban centres. How did they work? What role did the palaces have in their towns, and the towns in their landscapes?

It might seem that with such richly documented architectural remains these questions would have been answered long ago. Yet, analysis has mostly found itself confined to building materials and techniques, basic formal descriptions, and functional evaluations. Critical evaluation of these data as constituting a dynamic built environment has thus been slow in coming.

This volume aims to provide a first step in this direction. It brings together international scholars whose research focuses on Minoan architecture and urbanism as well as on theory and methods in spatial analyses. By combining methodological contributions with detailed case studies across the different scales of buildings, settlements and regions, the volume proposes a new analytical and interpretive framework for addressing the complex dynamics of the Minoan built environment.

The book deserves a prominent place in every serious archaeological library and an admission to the must-read lists of pertinent graduate seminars.

Autorentext
Quentin Letesson is Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Art, University of Toronto and the Département d'histoire de l'art et d'archéologie, Université catholique de Louvain. His work focuses on configurational analyses of the Minoan built environment, on the urbanisation of Crete, and on the emergence of technical innovations in the production of Minoan material culture. He teaches archaeological theory and ethnoarchaeology at the Université catholique de Louvain. He is involved in several excavations on Crete, most notably at Palaikastro and Sissi. Carl Knappett teaches in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto, where he holds the Walter Graham/ Homer Thompson Chair in Aegean Prehistory. He is an archaeologist interested in how things generate meaning through their creation and use. While the things of the Aegean Bronze Age are his main focus, particularly the pottery of Minoan Crete, he attempts to integrate insights from the study of things in ethnographic, ethnoarchaeological and sociological contexts with a view to developing a broad-based approach to materiality in society. His publications include Thinking Through Material Culture (Penn Press), An Archaeology of Interaction, and Network Analysis in Archaeology (both with Oxford University Press). He conducts fieldwork at various Bronze Age sites across the Aegean, and directs the new excavations at the Minoan town of Palaikastro in east Crete.

Inhalt
1: Quentin Letesson and Carl Knappett: Introduction: Minoan Built Environment: Past Studies, Recent Perspectives, and Future Challenges
Part I
2: Quentin Letesson and Carl Knappett: Architecture: Building Dynamics at the Micro-Scale
3: Tim Cunningham: Best Laid Plans: An Archaeology of Architectural Anomalies in Bronze Age Crete
4: Maud Devolder: Architectural Energetics and Late Bronze Age Cretan Architecture: Measuring the Scale of Minoan Building Projects
5: Jan Driessen: Understanding Minoan in-House Relationships on Late Bronze Age Crete
Part II
6: Quentin Letesson and Carl Knappett: Urbanism: Built Space and Communities at the Meso-scale
7: Todd Whitelaw: The Development and Character of Urban Communities in Prehistoric Crete in their Regional Context: A Preliminary Study
8: Clairy Palyvou: Minoan Group Design: The 'View from the Bridge'
9: D. Matthew Buell and John McEnroe: Community Building/Building Community at Gournia
10: Joseph W. Shaw: The Middle Minoan Slipway for Ships at the Kommos Harbour, and Harbour Development in Prehistoric Crete
Part III
11: Quentin Letesson and Carl Knappett: Processes AndPatterns at the Macro-Scale: Crete and Beyond
12: Eleftheria Paliou and Andrew Bevan: Computational Approaches to Minoan Settlement Interaction and Growth
13: Louise A. Hitchcock and Aren M. Maeir: Lost in Translation: Settlement Organization in Postpalatial Crete, a View from the East
14: Rodney D. Fitzsimons and Evi Gorogianni: Dining on the Fringe? A Possible Minoan-Style Banquet Hall at Ayia Irini, Kea and the Minoanisation of the Aegean Islands
15: Quentin Letesson, Carl Knappett, and Michael E. Smith: A Comparative Perspective on Minoan Urbanism

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