The papers found in this volume were first presented at the fifth Round Table on Aegean Archaeology, held at Sheffield in January 2000. They were subsequently re-written, in the light of the intensive discussion and debate which they generated, for publication in this volume. Two contributors to the Round Table were unable, for various reasons, to contribute a chapter to the book, but they contributed fully to the discussions which informed the papers published here. We would like to acknowledge the contributions of C5'prian Broodbank and Vance Watrous, as well as the full part played by our principal discussant, Anthony Snodgrass.
Our Round Table was about urbanism, and so is this volume; it is not concerned with urbanisation. That is, we focus not on the process but rather on its end-product. This is partly because we did not want the discussion t(3 drift from urbanisation to state-formation or the emergence of civilisation. Important and interesting as they are, these topics have been the centre of much debate in Aegean prehistory over the past thirty years, and they will be so again. The nature and character of Bronze Age towns, however, has seen much less discussion, particularly at a generalised level. Papers on prehistoric Aegean towns have largely focussed on their architecture, and particularly their elite or public architecture, and are often restricted to a single town or even a single building. The purpose of the Round Table was to direct attention and thought not only to urban settlements as a whole but to their social and economic roles, their demographic significance, and ultimately to their character or personality. These are, after all, what makes a town different to a village, and urban different to rural. They underpin the definition of a town which I offered the Round Table, and which I unashamedly admit is taken from the combined words of Louis Wirth (in 1938) and Bruce Trigger (in 1972): 'a relatively large, dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals, which performs specialist functions, of a non-agricultural type, in relationship to a broader hinterland'.
Whilst that definition can be seen to embrace a number of both Minoan and Mycenaean nucleated settlements, most Aegean prehistorians have long recognised that Minoan towns were in some respects quite different to those of contemporary mainland Greece. This was something that was brought out by our discussions, and indeed the differences were seen to be perhaps more wide-ranging than we had previously realised.
Minoan Urbanism
Todd Whitelaw rightly says that to understand Minoan urbanism we must first attempt to establish its scale in human terms, which means getting to grips with the difficult topic of population estimates. He presents probably the most carefully argued and thoughtful paper yet published on this topic (and an appendix provides some of the raw data for others to use in further research). Keith Branigan compares urban and rural populations and concludes that urbanism was a way of life for a very significant part of the Minoan population, and that it was structured in a three-tier hierarchy. Jan Driessen, whilst accepting a similar hierarchical structure, uses the evidence provided by more than twenty regional surveys to argue that both settlement history and hierarchy varies from region to region. Tim Cunningham takes the arguement a stage further, with a detailed examination of urban settlements and their hinterlands in east Crete. He identifies local variability both in centre-periphery relations, and in the spatial organisation of towns. The same theme of temporal and regional variability is taken up by Use Schoep in her discussion of the urban-hinterland relationship as revealed in the archival evidence. She suggests that in Protopalatial Crete administrative documents are restricted to urban centres and 'public' buildings, whilst in the Neopalatial they are more widely distributed in town and country and appear in private as well as 'public' contexts. Her case studies suggest that urban-rural relationships may have been managed in different ways for different purposes in different times and places.
Overall, the papers or Minoan urbanism suggest that towns were a very significant part of Minoan life, demographically and socially as well as economically, but that the ways in which the urban-rural dialogue was articulated varied considerably from region to region, as well as from Protopalatial to Neopalatial.
World History
