He has returned again and again, asking the sort of questions about the vegetation and landscape that had inspired his best-selling books on the countryside and ancient woodlands of Britain. In the last decade he has teamed up with American archaeologist Jennifer Moody, who has worked on Crete since 1978. Rackham and Moody have cast a critical eye over Crete, sifting an array of botanical, zoological, geological, agricultural, archaeological and historical data, even a few pollen cores from rare peat deposits on this arid island. Their combination of field work, searches in Venetian archives, intuition and avid hoarding of observation and anecdote gives a fresh view of Crete. Crete, like mainland Greece and much of the Mediterranean region, has the reputation of being a ruined landscape, a sad fragment of a sometime verdant 'Garden of Eden'.
Grazing especially is blamed.
Better heart indeed than it has been for centuries. Although there have been fluctuations in tree cover and intensity of agriculture, the ancient Minoans would have known similar vegetation to what we see today. If Rackham and Moody are correct, then we may have to rethink how we perceive Mediterranean vegetation and flora, and how we may conserve them. From about 3000 BC, the Minoans developed an advanced, indigenous Bronze Age civilization, building comfortable and stylish palaces. The island was united with Greece in 1912 and the last Turks left only during a 1923 exchange of populations.