The Plain Of Phaistos

The Plain of Phaistos presents the results on an interdisciplinary regional field project (1984-1987) carried out on the island Of Crete. This volume traces the changing patterns of settlement and cycles of social complexity from the Late Neolithic period to the present day within the heartland of the state of Phaistos. The authors and contributors publish geological, archaeological, environmental, botanical, historical and ethnographic studies that establish the regional identity of the Western Mesara. Using a combination of empirical, processual and post-processual theoretical approaches, the volume investigates a central problem - how and why did the Bronze Age and Classical states arise at Phaistos?

Based on fieldwork carried out from 1984-1987, this volume presents an exemplary survey of the Western Mesara region of Crete with detailed treatment of its physical and archaeological characteristics. The 15 chapters are grouped into the themes of the natural environment and its use and prehistoric and historical settlement and society. Specific chapter topics include geoarchaeology, cultural geography of Crete, agriculture and subsistence in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods, and chronological chapters describing evidence and interpretation of the area's various civilizations. Several appendices contain methods for botanical studies, the stone finds, and a register of the archaeological sites, among other information. A series of b&w plates, an exhaustive bibliography, and a glossary are provided. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

L’Annuario della Scuola Archeologica di Atene e delle Missioni Italiane in Oriente è pubblicato dal 1914. Presenta articoli originali e di sintesi sull’arte, l’archeologia, l’architettura, la topografia, la storia, le religioni, l’antropologia del mondo antico, l’epigrafia e il diritto. L’interesse è rivolto alla Grecia e alle aree della grecità attraverso il tempo, dalla preistoria all’età bizantina e oltre, nonché alle interazioni con l’Oriente, l’Africa e l’Europa continentale. L’Annuario è composto da tre sezioni: Saggi, Scavi e Ricerche e Atti della Scuola 2021, a cura di Emanuele Papi. Gli articoli vengono approvati dal Comitato Editoriale e da due valutatori anonimi. I contributi sono pubblicati in una delle seguenti lingue: italiano, greco, inglese, francese, con riassunti in italiano, greco e inglese.

Archaeologists have focused a great deal of attention on explaining the evolution of village societies and the transition to a ‘Neolithic’ way of life. Considerable interest has also concentrated on urbanism and the rise of the earliest cities. Between these two landmarks in human cultural development lies a critical stage in social and political evolution. Throughout world, at various points in time, people living in small, dispersed village communities have come together into larger and more complex social formations. These community aggregates were, essentially, middle-range; situated between the earliest villages and emergent chiefdoms and states. This volume explores the social processes involved in the creation and maintenance of aggregated communities and how they brought about revolutionary transformations that affected virtually every aspect of a society and its culture. While there have been a number of studies that address coalescence from a regional perspective, less is understood about how aggregated communities functioned internally. The key premise explored in this volume is that large-scale, long-term cultural transformations were ultimately enacted in the context of daily practices, interactions, and what might be otherwise considered the mundane aspects of everyday life. How did these processes play out "on the ground" in diverse and historically contingent settings? What are the strategies and mechanisms that people adopt in order to facilitate living in larger social formations? What changes in social relations occur when people come together? This volume employs a broadly cross-cultural approach to interrogating these questions, employing case studies which span four continents and more than 10,000 years of human history.

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 last several decades have seen a dramatic increase in interest in the Roman period on the island of Crete. Ongoing and some long-standing excavations and investigations of Roman sites and buildings, intensive archaeological survey of Roman areas, and intensive research on artifacts, history, and inscriptions of the island now provide abundant data for assessing Crete alongside other Roman provinces. New research has also meant a reevaluation of old data in light of new discoveries, and the history and archaeology of Crete is now being rewritten. The breadth of topics addressed by the papers in this volume is an indication of Crete’s vast archaeological potential for contributing to current academic issues such as Romanization/acculturation, climate and landscape studies, regional production and distribution, iconographic trends, domestic housing, economy and trade, and the transition to the late-Antique era. These papers confirm Crete’s place as a fully realized participant in the Roman world over the course of many centuries but also position it as a newly discovered source of academic inquiry.

This work presents a classification system and absolute chronology for black-gloss wares from Crete, establishing the first local and regional ceramic sequences during the period from 600 to 400 B.C. This new chronological foundation of datable pottery from excavated sites fills in the so-called 6th-/5th-century gap and dispels the prevailing view that this was a period of decline in population and one of artistic and cultural impoverishment. The 6th century heralded important changes in Cretan society, reflected in the reorganization of burial grounds, new patterns of sanctuary dedication, and the circulation of exotica among the elite. The study reveals unsuspected connections with mainland Greece, especially Sparta and Athens. Historians and archaeologists will find the author's conclusions, and their implications, to be of considerable interest.

This volume presents the papers of an international colloquium on the archaeology of houses and households in ancient Crete held in Ierapetra in May 2005. The 38 papers presented here range from a discussion of household activities at Final Neolithic Phaistos to the domestic correlates of "globalization" during the early Roman Empire. These studies demonstrate a variety of methodological approaches currently employed for understanding houses and household activities. Key themes include understanding the built environment in all of its manifestations, the variability of domestic organization, the role of houses and households in mediating social (and perhaps even ethnic) identity within a community or region, household composition, and of course, household activities of all types, ranging from basic subsistence needs to production and consumption at a suprahousehold level.