| Popis: |
For the past 20 years, several studies have acknowledged Mycenaean cultural and political interference as well as continuous acculturation processes and hybridisation phenomena in an effort to reconstruct Late Minoan II-IIIB Cretan society through an analysis of its material culture and interactions with the Mycenaean mainland. A diachronic approach is fundamental to assessing and explaining the sociocultural and political transformations that affected Cretan communities for two and a half centuries (1450-1200 BCE). Contextualising these changes within the framework of contemporary Aegean developments participates in the discussions about the phenomenon of mycenaeanisation. In this regard, the present paper considers a distinct, two-step process in the context of Crete. Among the different dynamics that had affected the various regions of the island at this time, East Crete appears as a special case. This paper proposes to investigate the sociocultural characterisation of Cretan communities during the advanced Late Bronze Age from an Eastern Cretan perspective focusing on the study of ceramic traditions. Based on a diachronic typological and stylistic analysis of ceramic assemblages from different sites of this region (Palaikastro, Kato Zakros, Mochlos, Myrsini, Petras, Karoumes), the degree of regional connectivity and variation in pottery consumption is assessed. Such an approach allows us to examine local and regional ceramic traditions in terms of pottery exchange and cultural interconnection. It also informs our understanding of the maintenance and transformation of sociocultural practices within and between regional communities in the wider context of Monopalatial and Postpalatial Crete. The more specific recognition of interaction networks at both intra- and inter-regional scales is also preliminarily considered. In doing so, this study adds important new knowledge to a period of Bronze Age Crete very well known from site contexts, but still little explained from a regional and diachronic perspective. |
