Change and Transition on Crete: Interpreting the Evidence from the Hellenistic through to the Early Byzantine Period PDF Download

Author: Jane Francis
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1803270578
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
The theme of this volume, presented in honour of G.W.M. Harrison, whose academic contributions have enriched our perspective of Roman Crete, is change and transition, a topic that challenges some of the earlier approaches to Hellenistic and Roman Crete, and which presents a different perspective on historical events and archaeological evidence.

Author: Jane E. Francis
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1785700960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
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.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781803270562
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Rebecca J. Sweetman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107018404
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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This book examines the rich corpus of mosaics created in Crete during the Roman and Late Antique eras. It provides essential information on the style, iconography, and chronology of the material, as well as discussion of the craftspeople who created them and the technologies they used. The contextualized mosaic evidence also reveals a new understanding of Roman and Late Antique Crete. It helps shed light on the processes by which Crete became part of the Roman Empire, its subsequent Christianization, and the pivotal role the island played in the Mediterranean network of societies during these periods. This book provides an original approach to the study of mosaics and an innovative method of presenting a diachronic view of provincial Cretan society.

Author: Søren Dietz
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1785707213
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1332

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Communities in Transition brings together scholars from different countries and backgrounds united by a common interest in the transition between the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age in the lands around the Aegean. Neolithic community was transformed, in some places incrementally and in others rapidly, during the 5th and 4th millennia BC into one that we would commonly associate with the Bronze Age. Many different names have been assigned to this period: Final Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Eneolithic, Late Neolithic [I]-II, Copper Age which, to some extent, reflects the diversity of archaeological evidence from varied geographical regions. During this long heterogeneous period developments occurred that led to significant changes in material culture, the use of space, the adoption of metallurgical practices, establishment of far-reaching interaction and exchange networks, and increased social complexity. The 5th to 4th millennium BC transition is one of inclusions, entanglements, connectivity, and exchange of ideas, raw materials, finished products and, quite possibly, worldviews and belief systems. Most of the papers presented here are multifaceted and complex in that they do not deal with only one topic or narrowly focus on a single line of reasoning or dataset. Arranged geographically they explore a series of key themes: Chronology, cultural affinities, and synchronization in material culture; changing social structure and economy; inter- and intra-site space use and settlement patterns, caves and include both site reports and regional studies. This volume presents a tour de force examination of many multifaceted aspects of the social, cultural, technological, economic and ideological transformations that mark the transition from Neolithic to Early Bronze Age societies in the lands around the Aegean during the 5th and 4th millennium BC.

Author: Guy D. Middleton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110715149X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
In this lively survey, Guy D. Middleton critically examines our ideas about collapse - how we explain it and how we have constructed potentially misleading myths around collapses - showing how and why collapse of societies was a much more complex phenomenon than is often admitted.

Author: Guy D. Middleton
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1789254280
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The years c. 1250 to 1150 BC in Greece and the Aegean are often characterised as a time of crisis and collapse. A critical period in the long history of the region and its people and culture, they witnessed the end of the Mycenaean kingdoms, with their palaces and Linear B records, and, through the Postpalatial period, the transition into the Early Iron Age. But, on closer examination, it has become increasingly clear that the period as a whole, across the region, defies simple characterisation – there was success and splendour, resilience and continuity, and novelty and innovation, actively driven by the people of these lands through this transformative century. The story of the Aegean at this time has frequently been incorporated into narratives focused on the wider eastern Mediterranean, and most infamously the ‘Sea Peoples’ of the Egyptian texts. In twenty-five chapters written by 25 specialists, Collapse and Transformation instead offers a tight focus on the Aegean itself, providing an up-to date picture of the archaeology ‘before’ and ‘after’ ‘the collapse’ of c. 1200 BC. It will be essential reading for students and scholars of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean regions, as well as providing data and a range of interpretations to those studying collapse and resilience more widely and engaging in comparative studies. Introductory chapters discuss notions of collapse, and provide overviews of the Minoan and Mycenaean collapses. These are followed by twelve chapters, which review the evidence from the major regions of the Aegean, including the Argolid, Messenia, and Boeotia, Crete, and the Aegean islands. Six chapters then address key themes: the economy, funerary practices, the Mycenaean pottery of the mainland and the wider Aegean and eastern Mediterranean region, religion, and the extent to which later Greek myth can be drawn upon as evidence or taken to reflect any historical reality. The final four chapters provide a wider context for the Aegean story, surveying the eastern Mediterranean, including Cyprus and the Levant, and the themes of subsistence and warfare.

Author: Valasia Isaakidou
Publisher: Oxbow Books
ISBN: 1782974903
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Beneath the Bronze Age 'Palace of Minos', Neolithic Knossos is one of the earliest known farming settlements in Europe and perhaps the longest-lived. For 3000 years, Neolithic Knossos was also perhaps one of very few settlements on Crete and, for much of this time, maintained a distinctive material culture. This volume radically enhances understanding of the important, but hitherto little known, Neolithic settlement and culture of Crete. Thirteen papers, from the tenth Sheffield Aegean Round Table in January 2006, explore two aspects of the Cretan Neolithic: the results of recent re-analysis of a range of bodies of material from J.D. Evans' excavations at EN-FN Knossos; and new insights into the Cretan Late and Final Neolithic and the contentious belated colonisation of the rest of the island, drawing on both new and old fieldwork. Papers in the first group examine the idiosyncratic Knossian ceramic chronology (P. Tomkins), human figurines from a gender perspective (M. Mina), funerary practices (S. Triantaphyllou), chipped stone technology (J. Conolly), land and-use and its social implications (V. Isaakidou). Those in the second group, present a re-evaluation of LN Katsambas (N. Galanidou and K. Mandeli), evidence for later Neolithic exploration of eastern Crete (T. Strasser), Ceremony and consumption at late Final Neolithic Phaistos (S. Todaro and S. Di Tonto), Final Neolithic settlement patterns (K. Nowicki), the transition to the Early Bronze Age at Kephala Petra (Y. Papadatos), and a critical appraisal of Final Neolithic 'marginal colonisation' (P. Halstead). In conclusion, C. Broodbank places the Cretan Neolithic within its wider Mediterranean context and J.D. Evans provides an autobiographical account of a lifetime of insular Neolithic exploration.

Author: Florence Gaignerot-Driessen
Publisher: Presses universitaires de Louvain
ISBN: 287558328X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This volume brings together a series of papers reflecting a number of lectures given at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) in 2010-2012 in the frame of a seminar entitled La naissance des cités crétoises. Eight Cretan sites (Axos, Phaistos, Prinias, Karphi, Dreros, Azoria, Praisos, and Itanos), recently excavated or re-excavated, are considered in their regional and historical context in order to explore the origin and early development of the Greek city-state on the island.

Author: Ilse Schoep
Publisher: Oxbow Books Limited
ISBN: 9781842174319
Category : Bronze Age
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Ever since their first discovery, more than a century ago, the Minoan Palaces have dominated scholarship on the Cretan Bronze Age. Opinion long held that their first appearance, seemingly at the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age, marked a pivotal transformation point, during which the simple, egalitarian societies of the Early Bronze Age were transformed into something significantly more complex, hierarchical and civilized. Over the last three decades, however, theoretical developments, together with new research and discoveries, have so thoroughly undermined this conceptualization of the Early and Middle Bronze Age that it seemed advisable to go back to the beginning, reevaluate our theories and models and ask anew what we really know about social and political complexity on Crete from the end of the Neolithic to Middle Minoan II (c.3600-1750/00 BC). Back to the Beginning explores this theme through fifteen papers. They cover both the principal central Cretan urban centuries of Knossos, Malia and Phaistos and the smaller communities that lay beyond them in central and eastern Crete. Many present significant new bodies of settlement and cemetery data, whether recently acquired or reinterpreted from older excavations. All place a clear and concerted emphasis on breaking down complexity into different social processes and relations and building up an understanding of society, from the bottom up, as a host of interacting and potentially conflicting agents or scales of identity. All too are concerned with addressing long-standing and fundamental research questions. When, in fact, does the Bronze Age begin in real terms? How did socioeconomic diversity play out across the Cretan landscape? When and where did the monumental Court Complexes, which convention terms Palaces, emerge; how did they function and how did this vary? Were the Court Complexes entirely new phenomena or were they rooted more firmly in preexisting traditions and practices? What happened in MM I and how, more generally, might we frame and explain the Early and Middle Bronze Age in more inclusive terms? How were different communities structured and how did this vary? Is it appropriate to talk of urbanism and state formation during this period and if so, when and where? By taking us significantly closer to resolving these questions, Back to the Beginning ushers in a new era of understanding for the Early and Middle Bronze Age on Crete.