Minoan Crete is remarkable for the density of its remains. Elsewhere in Greece it was the “New Wave” of intensive regional surface survey since the 1970s which revealed the staggering density of archaeological sites in the Greek landscape (Cherry 1983, Bintliff 1994). But for Crete, Pendlebury’s prewar (1939) maps of Minoan Bronze Age sites, then as now, amaze with their hundreds of findspots. Caution is required however. Pendlebury mapped almost every place where a Minoan sherd popped up during his travels over the entire island (mainly on foot!) (Gkiasta 2008). There is also reason to believe that the high quality of Minoan ceramics, already from EM times, allowed them to survive and be recognized in the plough soil much better than the coarser wares which often make up the bulk of the site assemblages on the Bronze Age Mainland and Islands (Bintliff et al. 1999, Bevan 2002, Bintliff 2002, Watrous et al. 2004), making site discovery perhaps many times easier for Crete. Recent high-quality intensive surveys allow a more realistic and nuanced view of the infill of the prehistoric Cretan landscape.
Figure 5.1 illustrates the increasing settlement density for the district of Vrokastro (Eastern Crete) (Hayden et al. 1992). The Second Palace era exhibits climax levels of population and land use, not to be repeated until Roman Imperial times on the island. Elements accounting for this growth include the long-term impact of the introduction of ploughs drawn by oxen, the use of secondary products from domestic animals (Isaakidou 2006), the development of olive and vine production, and the mutual feedback between growing urban populations’ demand for surpluses and the levels of production achieved by rural villages. Additional boosts to the Cretan rural economy came from agricultural terracing and water control dams. The former at the Minoan settlement of Pseira are argued to be of palatial age (French 1991), where the terraces’ soil chemistry, associated with abundant household pottery fragments, suggests that agricultural productivity was increased by using manure from settlement waste products (Palmer 1995). Such a density ofMiddle Bronze Age rural settlement is absent from the contemporary Cyclades and Southern Mainland. Significantly, on the island of Kythera off the south coast of the Mainland, and on the heavily Minoan-influenced Cycladic island of Thera, we find a similar settlement pattern, pointing to the export of a specific approach to land-use (Bevan 2002, Forsyth 1999).
Till recently, on analogy with the subsequent, better-documented Mycenaean palace societies, it was argued that Minoan elites controlled the total production of Crete, whether in food staples or manufactured products. Palaces in both civilizations manipulated surpluses for their personnel’s needs, for foreign exchange, and to alleviate shortages: a “redistribution” system (Renfrew 1972). The immense areas devoted to bulk storage of varied goods within the palaces, and the generalized use of archives and seals, which were linked both in location and in the images on them with numbered goods, seemed to agree. This scenario has undergone radical revision. The Mycenaean texts have now been shown to differ in significant ways from the archaeological evidence for the economy (Halstead 1992), suggesting that a public economy was at least evenly matched in production by a flourishing private economy, although there were essential exchanges of labor and products between them.
For the Minoan palaces, an additional if controversial argument has reconceptualized these architectural complexes as “ceremonial-centers,” dedicated to large-scale ritual feasting, at least in their early “courtyard complex” form during the Early Minoan Pre-Palatial and the Middle Minoan First Palace eras (Schoep 2010). Much of the stored equipment and foodstuffs within these complexes might have served to support communal rituals for their associated town and wider rural populations. Nonetheless, in the Second Palace period, especially after the
Figure 5.1 The Vrokastro Survey in Eastern Crete shows the progressive infill of the Cretan landscape between the Final Neolithic and First Palace period (above) and the Second Palace period (facing page).
J. B. Hayden, J. A. Moody, and O. Rackham, “The Vrokastro Survey Project, 1986—1989. Research design and preliminary results.” Hesperia 61/3 (1992), 293—353, Figures 16 and 17. Reproduced by permission of American School of Classical Studies at Athens © 1992.
Traumatic effects of the Thera volcanic eruption in LM1A, it is conceded that the palaces may have become increasingly shut off from the general public and undergone conversion to an activity sphere for a limited elite sector and its officials and servants,
Perhaps involving actual residence within them of a part of this class. This would conform more closely to the traditional “dynastic palace” model which the pioneer excavator of Knossos Arthur Evans proposed (Evans 1921-1935).
Figure 5.1 {Cant’d').
Haggis (2002) uses regional survey innovatively to place these dynamics in the palaces in parallel with changes in the countryside. In the Kavousi district of Eastern Crete he records rural settlement intensifying between the Pre-Palatial and First Palace periods; he reconstructs a preference for areas suited to mixed cropping using spring-fed gardens alongside dryfarming (rain-fed), and village-based pastoralism. However for Second Palace times, a significant relocation of sites into the lowlands, and to places with easy access to the coast and road systems, together with population nucleation into larger rural sites, mark a new emphasis: he sees this as large-scale irrigated specialist farming, whilst the older, traditional settlements in the hill country become nucleated into “estate centers.” The first mode sees rural populations produce small surpluses for intervillage exchange, focusing on broad mixed economies at the individual settlement level, and where distant “courtyard com-plex/palace” centers played no real role. In the second mode, palatial intervention shifts the dominant locally-based consumption into a production for state-controlled manipulation of specialized crop surpluses. Also in the Malia Survey (Muller 1996) and the Mesara Survey (Watrous et al. 2004) the later Palatial sites are fewer but larger, perhaps indicating greater outside control of production.
Some doubts remain: the evidence for large-scale irrigation is lacking. Alternatively the shift to the lowland plains might represent a redirection toward cereal monocropping, although this would still work with his model. More unclear is why Haggis sees this gearing-up to a market economy as unstable. If we look at the increasing size and complexity of the dominant towns in Minoan Crete, at the postulated rising intervention into rural areas symbolized by the widespread creation of the so-called Second Palace “villas” and additional small palaces, and at changes in remoter village societies which Haggis himself documents, we could see all this as a more positive development, with the integration of the island’s resources from local to interregional exchange.
Much depends on whether benefits flowed back to rural settlements, and how far they could cover their own food needs as well as obtain necessary manufactured items and minor luxuries. Two contrasted models from later Greek history spring to mind: the late Ottoman giftlik estates, where serfs lived in relative poverty whilst producing cash crops for the market, and the early Ottoman and Early Modern Greek villages, where adequate self-sufficiency in most agricultural products was balanced by specialization in certain crops for the market to pay taxes and buy consumer goods. In the Minoan case, the “market” may have been in part “tax” levied by the authorities at the major or minor palace centers, but part, it is now generally agreed, was available for the peasants’ own private exchanges. A sample of Minoan population has been examined from burials, and combined with chemical analyses of pottery contents and the evidence of plant and animal remains (ecofacts), has prompted a provisional conclusion that the Minoans in general had a good diet and low disease rates, whilst rich and poor consumed meals high in protein from meat and pulses (Smith 1999).
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