Back to the Beginning: Reassessing Social and Political Complexity on Crete during the Early and Middle Bronze Age

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? 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.