Crete enters the wider Aegean world? Reassessing connectivity and cultural interaction in the southern Aegean between the late Neolithic and the beginning of the EBA (5th and 4th millennium BC) (original) (raw)

2020, Communication Uneven. Acceptance and Resistance to Foreign Influences in the Connected Ancient Mediterranean

In a landmark article published in 1996, L. Vagnetti argued that Crete in the Final Neolithic period (4500-3000 BC) ended a seclusion lasting two millennia, and entered the wider Aegean world in the context of “a new trend of establishing long-distant communications, urged by the introduction of new technologies, such as metallurgy”. The basis for this statement was provided by the pottery found at Nerokourou, in west Crete, which linked more strongly with sites located in other Aegean islands, than with sites located in Crete itself. Subsequent research into the Final Neolithic of Crete confirmed its importance as a period of major socio-economic reconfiguration, but opened up a debate regarding the trigger that initiated these changes, because some scholars interpret them as the result of the arrival of new groups from overseas late in the Final Neolithic (henceforth FN) (Nowicki 2002; 2014), and others as the outcome of an increase in long-distance connectivity originating from Crete (Papadatos &Tomkins 2013). In the first scenario, based on the appearance of new types of sites with new ceramic types, the Cretan population had a rather passive role in the process of reconfiguration; in the second, based on the results of analytical studies conducted on pottery from old and newly excavated sites, the change started from Crete thanks to sites like Kephala-Petras that established long-distance relationships with areas as remote as Attica to get products and raw materials that were not locally available (Papadatos 2008; Papadatos & Tomkins 2013). The results of recent geological and archaeological research conducted at Phaistos, an elevated site located in south-central Crete, permits the reconsideration of some of these issues because it has been shown that the site, until the very end of the 4th millennium BC, was on the coast and, after sporadic frequentations that occurred during the 5th millennium BC, was settled by people who shared the same material culture as the extremely mobile groups that colonised most of the Aegean islands between the end of the 6th and the end of the 4th millennium BC. Phaistos therefore provides a good opportunity for ascertaining whether and to what extent substantial changes in material culture could have been triggered by human mobility, and also allows questions of where, and why people moved, to be addressed while also providing important insights for interpreting the uneven nature of the relationship between Crete and the southern Aegean between the 5th and 3rd millennia BC.