The Minoans of Crete - Archaeology Magazine The Minoans of Crete More than 100 years after it was first discovered, the town of Gournia is once again redefining the island's past By JARRETT A. LOBELL Monday, April 06, 2015 The well-preserved remains of the ancient Minoan town of Gournia in eastern Crete still stand after more than 3,500 years. I know a place where there are a lot of old things,” a peasant named George Perakis told the schoolmaster of the small village of Vasiliki, on the island of Crete, in the spring of 1901. Aware of a visiting American archaeologist’s anxious search to find a site of her own to excavate, the schoolmaster arranged for Perakis and his brother Nicholas to take Harriet Boyd and her colleague Blanche Wheeler to Gournia, four miles northwest of the village. Over several hours on May 19 Boyd collected a few potsherds and located the tops of several ancient walls, enough to convince her it was worth sending a team of workmen to the site the next morning.

When she arrived at Gournia on the afternoon of the 20th, Boyd was astonished to see the men holding a bronze spear and sickle and numerous fragments of stone and pottery vessels, and clearing the threshold of a house and a well-paved road complete with a clay gutter. The following day Boyd returned with 51 workmen, and within three days, additional houses and roads had been uncovered, as well as more vases and bronze tools, making her certain that she had found what she was seeking—a Bronze Age settlement of what she called “the best period of Cretan civilization.” During three seasons ending in 1904, Boyd and her team, which averaged more than a hundred workmen along with a number of local girls whose job was to wash the finds, excavated the remains of an ancient town that had lain buried and unknown for nearly 3,500 years. Boyd couldn’t have come to Crete at a better time. During the years that she worked there at the start of the twentieth century, a new, uniquely Cretan, Bronze Age civilization was starting to be uncovered.

In 1900, British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans had begun digging at the site of Knossos on the northeast coast of Crete and, within months, had discovered what he named the “Palace of Minos,” after the legendary king of Crete whose labyrinth was once believed to contain the half-man, half-bull creature known as the Minotaur. Evans later used the name “Minoan” to describe the civilization, a term that had first been employed by the German scholar Karl Hoeck in 1823 in his history of Crete. Although his interpretation of Knossos as the palace of Minos, and indeed some of his characterizations of Minoan civilization, have been disputed or even disproved over the last century, Evans’ pioneering work in Crete and his recognition of Minoan culture as something distinct from the Neolithic culture that preceded it, or the various cultures, including the Mycenaeans, that followed, cannot be understated. The first excavations at Gournia were directed by American archaeologist Harriet Boyd (second row, far right) between 1901 and 1904.

When Harriet Boyd went looking for that “best period,” then, she wanted to find Minoans. At Gournia, she discovered something of a completely different nature from Evans’ palace. Now, more than a hundred years after she began her search, a new team of archaeologists is continuing what she began, re-excavating some of the spaces she first uncovered, and digging completely new areas in order to add to the picture of a very ancient civilization that developed at the same time as the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge were built, and about which many questions remain. Crete is the largest island in Greece and the fifth largest in the Mediterranean, spanning some 160 miles from east to west. At the center it is 37 miles north to south, while on the east, near the town of Ierapetra, not far from Gournia, the island stretches just seven and a half miles from coast to coast. The landscape varies from snow-topped mountains, the highest of which, Mount Ida, reaches more than 8,000 feet, to deep gorges and caves, expansive valleys, fertile plateaus, and sandy beaches, all surrounded by the blue waters of the Aegean Sea.

Located at the crossroads of three continents, Crete has attracted visitors, travelers, and traders for thousands, and even tens of thousands, of years. The island has had an important role in the Mediterranean at many times, both ancient and modern, and has been a prized possession of major powers from the third millennium B.C. through the cultures of the Mycenaeans, Romans, Byzantines, Venetians, and Ottomans, and as an occupied territory of Hitler’s Third Reich. Stone vases, such as this example made of serpentinite, found and perhaps produced at Gournia, are one of the most telling categories of Minoan artifacts. But Crete’s first great civilization was that of the Minoans. Evans suggested that the Minoans were refugees forced from northern Egypt by invaders more than 5,000 years ago. In the era in which he was working, it seemed impossible to imagine a sophisticated Bronze Age Aegean civilization that didn’t have some ties to Egypt, whose considerable antiquity, religious and political complexity, and architectural and artistic achievements had been well known for some time.

In fact, Evans based his chronology of Minoan civilization on the Egyptian model of Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, dividing its history into periods he called Early, Middle, and Late, and further subdividing it using Roman numerals and letters where more precise dates were required. For many decades, however, most scholars have doubted Evans’ concept of Minoan origins. As to the question of when the original settlers came, likely over the course of several migratory events, “we should probably focus on the Neolithic as the first period of sustained settlement and expansion on the island,” says archaeologist and Aegean prehistorian John Cherry of Brown University. “For earlier periods, before the seventh millennium B.C., evidence of settlement tends to wink on and off, perhaps indications of seasonal occupation only, or even of local extinctions.” A recent 10-year study led by George Stamatoyannopoulos of the University of Washington on 37 mitochondrial DNA samples extracted from bones excavated at a Late Neolithic and Minoan ossuary in the Agios Charalambos Cave in east-central Crete has suggested that the Minoans were the descendants of Neolithic farmers who had likely come from elsewhere in the Aegean.

“Previous DNA samples taken from other Minoan sites, such as the Early Bronze Age tholos [beehive-shaped] tombs at Odigitria in the south, were very badly degraded, but at Agios Charalambos we were very lucky because the cave had been sealed until 1975 and the bones were fantastic,” Stamatoyannopoulos says. “We came away with good evidence that the Minoans had European [and not African or Middle Eastern] mitochondrial DNA.” Stamatoyannopoulos’ team is now working to sequence the entire genome, which, says Cherry, should help scholars better understand how homogenous or heterogeneous Crete’s ancient population was, and how it varied over time. A large team of archaeologists has been working since 2010 to uncover parts of Gournia that Boyd had yet to explore. For the oldest era of Minoan civilization, Evans’ Early Minoan period, the evidence comes from burials and small settlements dating to between 3100 and 1900 B.C.

These finds demonstrate that, early on, the Minoans were excellent sailors who were actively trading with Egypt and the Near East, exchanging their cloth, timber, foodstuffs, and, likely, olive oil, for copper, tin, gold, silver, and ivory. It’s also clear that the Minoans were developing great skill as potters, metalsmiths, engravers, and creators of the carved stone vases that would become distinctive and valuable exports for more than a millennium to come. At the start of the second millennium B.C., a major change occurred in Minoan civilization. During the Protopalatial and Neopalatial periods, which correspond to Evans’ Middle Minoan IB through Late Minoan I periods, the Minoans built “palaces” (Evans’ name for these centers has persisted and is the basis for another system of chronology in which Minoan history is divided into Pre-, Proto-, Neo-, and Postpalatial eras) at locations mostly in the eastern part of the island including Knossos, Malia, Phaistos, and Zakros.

These palaces were large stone multistoried building complexes arranged around open, paved courtyards, and contained spaces for industrial activities, food processing and storage, religious celebrations, domestic use, sporting contests, and administrative functions—more of a city core than the single domestic entity that “palace” connotes. The palaces were equipped with elaborate staircases and sophisticated drainage and plumbing, and were also decorated with brightly colored frescoes, some of the most accomplished examples of painting in ancient Greece, depicting primarily scenes from nature and daily life. While it had been thought that the palaces supported a centralized political entity with the power to collect and redistribute taxes in the form of food, scholars are now much less sure than Evans was that this was how they actually functioned. Rather than being the locus of any sort of government with absolute control, an interpretation based on the model of the powerful urban temples of the ancient Near East, it seems more likely that they were autonomous entities used for communal rituals and ceremonies. It’s also possible that the palaces were storing large quantities of food for these events, as well as perhaps for the elite houses in the area, and paying rations to the artists and workers needed to build, decorate, and maintain each palace.

Any or all of these uses would likely have led to the need to keep accurate records, which, in turn, led to the development of writing—the first in the ancient Aegean world—in the form of the script known as Linear A, as well as the use of Cretan hieroglyphics that were likely based on the Egyptian writing system. Archaeologists, beginning with Evans, have found many artifacts bearing these scripts, though both remain largely undeciphered. In about 1700 B.C., the Minoan palaces were destroyed, probably by a massive earthquake, but were soon rebuilt and redecorated, ushering in two and a half centuries that saw the height of Minoan civilization. With well-established trade networks exchanging raw materials and luxury objects, and a relatively stable political environment, the Minoans flourished, although not as the preternaturally peaceful society pictured by Evans and his contemporaries. Most larger Minoan towns were, in fact, fortified.

A second widespread destruction of the palaces in about 1450 B.C., possibly at the hands of Mycenaeans from mainland Greece, resulted in a blending of Minoan and Mycenaean cultures that eventually led to the decline of the Minoan civilization. In this photo, the newly excavated architectural remains of the northeastern side of Gournia, to the left, appear lighter in contrast to the darker, gray buildings, to the right, that Boyd excavated. Thanks to Evans’ work at Knossos, as well that of the French at Malia, Italians at Phaistos, and Greeks at Zakros, a great deal was known from an early stage of research about the large palace sites of the Proto- and Neopalatial periods of Minoan history. And while Harriet Boyd may have hoped that her work would lead to similarly spectacular discoveries, at Gournia she uncovered something new and distinct—the well-preserved remains of a Minoan town. The site’s ancient name is not known, and Gournia, the name given to it by locals, comes from the Greek word gourna, a stone trough used for watering animals that can be found in any traditional Greek village.

Boyd uncovered dozens of houses, cobbled streets, a small palace, a cemetery, and countless bronze tools and weapons, stone and clay vessels, and personal and religious artifacts. But she had only three seasons at the site, and the turn of the twentieth century was still early days in the development of modern archaeological methods. After marrying archaeologist Charles Henry Hawes in 1906 and publishing her fieldwork in 1908, Boyd Hawes left Gournia, and thereafter it would be only sporadically, and rather lightly, reexamined. In 2010, when Vance Watrous of the University of Buffalo and his team began new excavations at Gournia more than a century after Boyd ended hers, there was, he believed, still a great deal to be uncovered. Some of the answers haven’t been far below the surface. “We’re really lucky here. The cultural remains start only five or six inches down,” says Watrous, adding, “No one seems to have come back here after the Late Minoan destruction, and there is very little Mycenaean evidence, and no overburden, so as soon as we start digging we’re in Minoan levels.

That’s really exciting.” From the beginning, the project’s focus hasn’t been the Neopalatial site that Boyd dug. “We’re looking instead at the site’s earlier history, the Protopalatial period, and questions of what happened before the development of the palace, how Gournia came to be a regional center, and what kind of town it was during these early phases,” Watrous explains. The team is also doing a complete architectural survey led by Field Director D. Matthew Buell of Trent University and John McEnroe of Hamilton College, and creating an entirely new site map with each wall redrawn using technologies not available to Boyd a century ago. “The first year we tried to sink our trenches according to Boyd’s plan and it wasn’t working,” Watrous says. “In some cases we found rooms, and even whole buildings, that weren’t on the original plan.” As Watrous stands at the north entrance to the site, about 125 feet above sea level, looking out at the Aegean only a third of a mile away, with the walls and streets of this very ancient town behind him, he seems like a small-town resident with out-of-town visitors, eager to show off his hometown’s best features.

Not even the very loud, unrelenting cicadas’ song or the intense summer heat dampens his enthusiasm. “I’m most interested in learning how people live,” Watrous says, walking on the original Minoan street’s tidy cobbles—and you get the sense that if you follow him, you’ll know how it would have been to live in Gournia, even more than 3,000 years after the last inhabitant has left. “At places like Knossos, Phaistos, and Malia, we have huge palace urban settlements, cities really, but Gournia is something smaller, between 500 and 800 people, so it’s closer to the land, and more vivid in some ways,” Watrous says. Of all the sites in the prehistoric Aegean, Gournia gives the best idea of what a Minoan town looked like, which Harriet Boyd understood after just three years of working there.

“The chief archaeological value of Gournia,” she wrote in her site publication, “is that it has given us a remarkably clear picture of the everyday circumstances, occupations, and ideals of the Aegean folk at the height of their true prosperity.” Buell agrees: “When most people think of Minoan archaeology they think in terms of the palaces as these monolithic elements devoid of settlements, but at Gournia we have the settlement and the palace, and that’s so important.” Between 2010 and 2014, Watrous and a yearly team of more than a hundred have added greatly to the picture of Gournia as a thriving urban center going back at least as far as the Protopalatial period (1900–1700 B.C.). On the north edge of the site, the team has found evidence of intensive industrial activity alongside domestic spaces. “There is no site comparable to Gournia anywhere nearby. These guys are not full-time farmers and this isn’t a farming village.

This is the only site like this in our region,” says Watrous, who also documented hundreds of other Minoan sites, most of which he believes are farmhouses, during an extensive regional survey he conducted between 1992 and 1994. According to Watrous, a normal Minoan family home would have had four to five pithoi (large storage jars) filled with food to survive a year, but at Gournia few of the houses had pithoi at all, suggesting that inhabitants were bartering for their food in exchange for the goods they manufactured there. One of Gournia’s main industries was metalworking, and evidence of this activity, such as these copper alloy scraps found in one room of the palace, has been found at locations all across the site. In the course of both Boyd’s and Watrous’ excavations, more than 50 houses or areas with evidence of industrial activity have been uncovered—20 areas producing pottery, 15 producing stone vases, 18 producing bronze and bronze implements, and some with evidence for textile production.

At one location on the north edge of the settlement, Buell points out an area of burned bedrock inside a space identified as a foundry. “Here we have all sorts of scraps of bronze crucibles, bronze drips, copper scraps, and iron used for flux. Elsewhere, we also found a tin ingot, the closest known source of which is Afghanistan, and copper ingots from Cyprus, so it’s clear they are making and working metal into objects on the site,” he says. Across the site, the team has found examples of Mirabello Ware, a distinctive type of pottery produced there on a large scale for both local use and for trade. One of the most important areas the team has excavated is on Gournia’s northern edge, where archaeologist John Younger of the University of Kansas has uncovered a complete pottery workshop where the town’s inhabitants were making both red clay coarse wares and buff clay fine wares.

In one room of the workshop there is a heap of what Younger calls “gray matter,” which, when his team sectioned it and sent it for analysis, was identified as possibly being clay from Vasiliki Ware, similar to that used to make the distinctive Gournia pottery, called Mirabello Ware, that is found at sites all over eastern and central Crete. In another room, in a phase dating to the Neopalatial period, Younger found 15 intact pots sitting upright on some benches, and in another room he found four large jars with numerous smaller pots inside. “There were pots inside pots for storage, just like I have in my cupboard at home,” Younger says, “and each one was a unique shape, so I think this was a kind of shop.” In yet another room, he found 10 cups only slightly different from one another. “I think you came here, picked out the pots you wanted. You could say, ‘I want a set of these, or ten of those,’ and then they were made and left to dry out in the yard,” Younger explains.

And in the summer of 2014, in a small area east of the workshop, the team found no less than 11 kilns superimposed on each other, further evidence of the impressive duration and scale of Gournia’s industrial production. The Minoans were excellent builders, as shown by the town’s many well-paved roads and the elegant ashlar masonry walls flanking the western courtyard of Gournia’s palace. Perhaps the other most significant area the team has excavated (and in some places re-excavated) was the space that Boyd had identified as the Neopalatial palace. There they have confirmed that the palace’s walls were intended to be quite impressive. On the north facade the walls were built using the masonry technique known as Cyclopean, in which the stones are unfinished, and, consist of white boulders that may have been visible at a distance to visitors to Gournia coming from the sea. On the western side, however, facing the courtyard, the sandstone blocks are of well-finished ashlar masonry, a more refined technique, and one likely intended to impress those coming to congregate in the palace itself, explains Buell.

The palace’s east wing features a large open space facing a valley, with views to a Minoan mountaintop sanctuary that, at 4,842 feet, is at the highest point in eastern Crete. “There’s a visual relationship between the palace and the peak sanctuary,” says Watrous, “and that’s really neat.” In a room of the palace the team found hundreds of ceramic cups, evidence of a large celebration that took place in about 1700 B.C.In one room the team found more than 700 conical cups in two different deposits. The first deposit dates to the Middle Minoan III period (ca. 1700 B.C.) and includes vessels containing burned earth, animal bones, and grape seeds. “These are the remains of the celebration to mark the completion of the palace, like a foundation deposit,” says Buell, adding, “They’re like ancient Dixie cups.” The second deposit dates to the beginning of the Late Minoan IB period, in about 1600 B.C., where, in addition to the other botanical remains, the team found pomegranate seeds in the cups.

The additional presence of pumice in some vessels suggests a ritual in response to the catastrophic eruption of the Thera volcano on the island of Santorini some 125 miles away. It’s clear, says Buell, that Gournia’s residents were also congregating in the central courtyard and eating and drinking, but they may have been amusing themselves in other ways too—the team also found a series of “counters,” perhaps used as gaming pieces. Within the palace, Watrous’ team made what may be their most exciting discovery: a small object that looked at first like a piece of burned bark, but that Watrous immediately recognized as a fragmentary Linear A tablet. Both Boyd and Watrous excavated many seals—clay nodules that were impressed by engraved gemstones to authenticate them—and both the tablet and the seals suggest a palatial system of administration. Boyd had also found a clay disk called a roundel bearing a short inscription in the Linear A script. One of the most important artifacts uncovered in the new excavations is a 1.18-inch fragment of a clay tablet inscribed on both sides (as seen above) with the largely undeciphered script known as Linear A.

Discovering the tablet “made my whole year,” says Watrous. “It seems to follow a formulaic format that records them sending objects of some sort to various places and shows that they were fully literate. It’s not great looking, I know, but it’s really important.” Just 400 yards from the town, on Mirabello Bay, Gournia’s ancient residents built a fully functioning harborSeveral structures originally explored by Boyd (but about which she never published) are the Minoan buildings she located on the north coast of Mirabello Bay, about 400 yards north of the site. In 2008 and 2009, Watrous returned to this area to clean and map it, at which time he was able to identify several of them and place them in the context of the entire site. “We found a large shed for storing ships, pithoi, anchors, and tackle for unloading cargo, as well as a cobbled street running from this harbor toward the town, all of which makes sense given the scale of the industrial production here,” Watrous says.

By the Neopalatial period, nearly 4,000 years ago, Gournia had a fully functioning harbor with a monumental building linked to the palace and a wharf for seagoing ships that sent goods out from the town and brought them back from overseas as part of the eastern-Mediterranean-wide trade network in which the Minoans thrived. A large shipshed on Mirabello Bay was originally excavated by Boyd in 1901, and was reexamined and cleared by the new team several years ago. Thousands of years before Evans discovered the first evidence of the Minoans, Crete had long been known as the subject of myth and legend. Fearing the wrath of her husband Kronos, who had devoured his other children, the goddess Rhea secretly gave birth to her son Zeus, the most powerful of the Greek gods, in the Dikteon Cave in the mountains of central Crete. It was back to Crete, too, that Zeus, in the form of a white bull, took the Phoenician woman Europa, where she became queen of the island and mother to King Minos.

And for the Athenians of the Golden Age, their great hero and king, Theseus, also had a Cretan past, for it was on the island that he slew the Minotaur and escaped the prison of King Minos’ labyrinth. Yet it was not only in their myths that the ancient Greeks spoke of Crete. In the Odyssey, which is thought to reflect events of the Late Bronze Age, Homer describes Crete as a “lovely land, washed by waves on every side, densely populated and boasting 90 cities....Among their cities is the great city of Knossos, where Minos reigned.” The Greek poet Hesiod told of “Cretans from Knossos, the city of Minos…who sailed their black ship to sandy Pylos [a Bronze Age settlement on the Greek mainland],” and the fifth-century B.C.

historian Thucydides wrote that Crete was the first place “to rule over the sea.” Although these writers were more than 1,500 years removed from the Minoans, nearly as far away in time as we are from the last days of the Roman Empire, Crete’s ancient inhabitants were revered and remembered as representatives of a sophisticated culture that, with its distinctive art, language, system of government, and maritime abilities, became Europe’s first great civilization. 1000+ images about Sir Arthur Evans on Pinterest | Ancient greece, The western and Illustrations Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas Sir Arthur Evans Sir Arthur John Evans (8 July 1851 – 11 July 1941) was an English archaeologist most famous for unearthing the palace of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete and for developing the concept of Minoan civilization from the structures and artifacts found there and elsewhere throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Evans was the first to define Cretan scripts Linear A and Linear B, as well as an earlier pictographic writing.

22 Pins100 Followers Athena Review, 3,3: Minoan Crete: Sir Arthur Evans and the Excavation of the Palace at Knossos Athena Review, Vol.3, no.3: Minoan Crete Sir Arthur Evans and the Excavation of the Palace at Knossos Before work began in Crete by the British archaeologist Evans at Knossos (1900), and his American contemporary Harriet Boyd at Gournia (1901-1904; see Box 1), knowledge of the Bronze Age Minoan culture was only faintly reflected in a few Classical Greek myths. By the time this pioneering work was finished several decades later, the Minoan periods on Crete had been defined well enough to identify them as a major civilization from ca. 1900-1300 BC. Evans was born in 1851 in Nash Mills, Hertfordshire, England. Studying history at the Universities of Oxford and Göttingen, Evans later became Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.

During this period (1884-1908), he became interested in seals (tiny carved stones) as sources of inscriptions from ancient, pre-Classical Mediterranean civilizations. [Fig.1: Arthur Evans holding Minoan vase.] Evans was particularly drawn to Crete as one such source of seals containing undeciphered early inscriptions. The ancient town site of Kafala (Knossos) on the northern coast of Crete, next to the capital city of Herakleion, was well-known to local inhabitants, who plowed up ancient objects, including pottery, coins, and seals, as they cultivated their fields. Knossos had been occupied up through the Roman period, and during the Classical and Hellenistic eras (500-200 BC) had issued its own coinage, which interestingly showed pictures of labyrinths, Minotaurs, and Ariadne, the stuff of later interpretations (fig.2). First to excavate at Knossos was an Herakleion merchant and antiquarian, aptly named Minos Kalokairinos, who in 1878 uncovered foundations of store rooms filled with large pithos jars.

Documentation of Kalokairinos' work by William Stillman, US Consul in Crete at the time, identifies the finds as being from the west magazine of the palace. Stillman also (somewhat prophetically) provides a sketch of the "Labyrinth of Daedelus," a portion of the foundations also dug up by Kalokairinos, and later identified as the Throne Room (Shaw 1990). [fig.2: Classic-era silver coin from Knossos (425-330 BC). At left, the obverse shows a Minotaur, while the reverse at right shows the head of Ariadne, surrounded by a meander pattern representing the labyrinth (CNG; SG-3211).] Turkish landowners, however, soon stopped the Kalokairinos investigations. Shortly thereafter, the famed German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, excavator of Troy and Mycenae, attempted to purchase the "Kefala hill" - actually a "tell," or artificial, mound caused by long-term occupations at Knossos since the Neolithic (see Macdonald , this issue) - but refused to pay prices he considered exorbitant.

Evans first visited Crete in 1894 to study and decipher two types of unknown scripts appearing on Cretan seals. A year later he published the results in the Ashmolean publication Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Script (Evans 1895), therein identifying both the enigmatic Minoan hieroglyphs ("Pictographs"), and the syllabic or pre-alphabetic ("Prae-Phoenician") scripts, now called Linear A and B. Political fortunes then played a part in assisting Evans to excavate in Crete, after the island had won its independence from Turkey. In 1899, Evans used money from a family inheritance to buy the site at Kefala. Using a sizable local work force, Evans began large-scale, systematic excavations at Knossos in 1900, and by the end of 1903 had uncovered many of the foundations of the large, sprawling structures he designated as the Palace. Restorations and reconstructions of portions of the walls and foundations often used reinforced concrete (fig.3), with reconstructed timber frames and other wooden structures painted in a pink or buff color.

Numerous examples of the now famous frescoes, discovered mainly as small fragments, were boldly restored. Evans is also responsible for restoring many of the now famous rooms within the palace, such as the Throne Room, with its pair of griffins in a fresco flanking a gypsum stone seat. These restoration methods have been often criticized for both over-interpretation of sometimes scanty remains, and for using materials foreign to Minoan architecture. [Fig.3: Reconstructed pillars and shield fresco at Knossos (photo: Athena Review). In his decisive (and highly controversial) site interpretations, Evans drew heavily from post-Bronze Age, ancient Greek mythology to postulate the site as the palace of the legendary King Minos. This conclusion is now much disputed (as suggested in several of the articles in this section), but early on gained solid footing among many archaeologists as well as in the popular imagination (cf. Cottrell 1962). In legends from sources varying from Herodotus to Hellenistic coins, Knossos was thought to be the palace site of Minos, king of the Cretan Minoans whose labyrinth contained the mythic Minotaur.

Evans interpreted the complex layout of the palace at Knossos as "labyrinthine," and connected this with the double-axe symbol or labrys found engraved on columns at the palace. Thus, his identification of Knossos' civilization as Minoan made a compelling if (at times) somewhat strained metaphor, given the associated myths of King Minos, the labyrinth, and the Minotaur. Besides his pioneering work in excavating the main palace site, among Evans' most significant discoveries at Knossos was the recovery of about 3000 ancient Linear A and B writing tablets . Linear B eventually proved to be an early form of ancient Greek from a later, Mycenaean occupation of the site. Linear A, a script representing the language of the Minoans, still remains largely undeciphered. Evans continued his research until 1931, with an interruption for the First World War. He published his monumental work in four volumes entitled The Palace of Minos at Knossos (1921-1935).

When Arthur Evans died in 1941, the British School of Archaeology took up further investigations at Knossos, continued to this day (see Macdonald , this issue). Despite many detractors, Evans stands as a major archaeologist whose creative imagination, motivation, and scholarship led him from an initial interest in inscriptions on tiny, carved seals to the discovery and documentation of Knossos, largest site of the Minoan civilization. [Note: This is article appears in the printed issue of Vol.3, no.3 of Athena Review (p.19). Copyright 2003, Athena Publications, Inc.] Sir Arthur John Evans and the excavation in Knossos Copyright ï¿½ ATG 2009 - Terms - Heraklion Crete Sir Arthur Evans in 1936, with his fieldwork. Ceramic water pipe from Knossos Sir Arthur John Evans and the excavation in Knossos Sir Arthur John Evans (8/7/1851-11/7/1941) was an English archaeologist who discovered the basis of the Minoan civilization, which during his day was a faint mythical memory.

He was the son of John Evans a paper industrialist and amateur archaeologist of Welsh descent. Educated at Harrow at Brazenrose college and at the university of Goetingen .He espoused his fathers interest in archaeology and worked at the Ashmole museum in Oxford during the period 1884-1908. Sir Arthur John Evans in Crete Evans was especially interested in Crete because it was the source of the seals which bearing primal uncoded engravings. The ancient city of Kefala (Knossos) on the north coast near Heraklion was known to the locals as the place where they unearth ancient ceramics and ornate coins as they cultivate their fields. Nevertheless the first person to excavate Knossos was actually an Heraklion man called Minos Kalokairinos who in 1878 discovered the foundations of storage spaces, full of pytharia (gigantic jars). Kalokairinoï¿½s work was recorded by a William Stilman a U.S. ambassador to Crete at the time, indicating that the findings belonged to the western wing of the palace.

Apart from the storage areas Kalokairinos excavated a section of the ï¿½Hall of the throneï¿½foundations. However the Turkish owners of the area soon stopped Kalokairinoï¿½s research. Then Heinrich Schlieman the famous German archaeologist attempted to buy the ï¿½Hill of Kefalaï¿½ which in reality was a ï¿½toumbaï¿½ or an artificial tomb or pile created from successive overlapping structures built on top of the previous residences of Knossos, dating from the Neolithic era. Schlieman had to abandon the idea because of the astronomically high prices demanded by the owners. In 1894 Evans visits Crete to study and decipher two types of unknown writing which appeared on the Cretan seals. A year later he published his findings under the auspices of the Ashmole museum, the title of which is Cretan hieroglyphics and pre-Phoenician writing (Evans 1895) thereby now acknowledged as the Linear A and B language tablets.

The excavation in Knossos The political changes that Crete underwent facilitated Evansï¿½ desire to start excavations after the Cretan revolution. In 1899 using money inherited from his parents Evans buys the property in Kefala, utilizing a huge working force for those times, undertakes large scale and systematic excavation of the site. By the end of 1903 he discovers a major part of the foundations of an extended complex which he identifies as the palace, the centre of the Minoan civilization. Not only did Evans discover the buried ruins, published (1921-1935) in four volumes, encompassing King Minosï¿½ Knossos palace, regarded as a classic work in archaeology but he also maintained them with state of the art methods (of his time) and succeeded in partly restoring them. In the restoration effort Evans used foreign material like cement. Inevitably he was criticized by people who believed that the means and materials used should have been similar to the ancient ones. Nevertheless Evansï¿½ effort literally helps the average visitor today even, to ï¿½readï¿½ the archaeological site.

Thus despite that the results still annoy present day researchers Evansï¿½motives in this case are fully justified. In addition to the pioneering excavation work of the palace area the more significant discoveries of Evans relate to the 3.000 Linear A and B language tablets. Linear B has been proven to be the primal form of the Greek language from the sub-Minoan period, whereas Linear A is the language of the Minoans which remains undeciphered until today. Evans was knighted in 1911 for his services in the archaeology of Knossos and the Ashmolean museum.The excavation work in Knossos ( the property which Evans bought to maintain and conserve from destruction), is still continuing actively today under the British archaeological school in Athens. Jan 05, 2012 Issue 51 , Great Discoveries , Greece 0 The dig Arthur Evans, the wealthy son of prehistorian John Evans, was ‘a man of independent means’ who did not need to earn his living. After completing his education at Harrow and Oxford, he travelled widely in the Balkans, and made a minor name for himself as the Manchester Guardian’s special correspondent in Bosnia and Croatia.

During this time, he studied Balkan antiquities, and on returning to England, he became Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, from 1884 to 1908. His interest in Knossos had been triggered by a visit to the site in 1894 – a visit made in pursuit of seals with a mysterious hieroglyphic writing that were turning up in the markets of Athens, and that purportedly came from Crete. In 1900, Evans completed negotiations for the purchase of the site, and excavation began, with the assistance of experienced field archaeologist Duncan Mackenzie. The main excavations, involving between 50 and 180 labourers, took place over the next five years, followed by conservation and, more controversially, reconstruction work. The main excavation report, The Palace of Minos, was published between 1921 and 1936. The discoveries Results surpassed all expectations.

Evans revealed a vast palace complex of Middle Bronze Age date (c.1900-1450 BC), establishing that a distinct ‘Minoan’ civilisation on Crete had preceded (and heavily influenced) the later ‘Mycenaean’ civilisation (c.1650-1150 BC) on the Greek mainland. It was during the ‘Second Palace Period’ (c.1700-1450 BC) that Knossos reached its zenith. The palace complex included a central courtyard, a secondary western courtyard, a suite of royal apartments, a throne room with carved gypsum throne, and extensive storerooms and workshops. Around 1,300 rooms were connected by a network of corridors. The rooms of the royal apartments were stacked three or four storeys high, and served by light-wells, water-pipes, drainage, and a grand staircase. The royal apartments, along with some other grand rooms, were decorated with elaborate, colourful, vibrant wall-frescos, depicting dolphins, flying fish, griffins, court ceremonies and rituals, and sports like boxing and bull-leaping.

The ground-floor and basement storerooms were notable for their numerous stone boxes and ceramic storage-jars (pithoi), containers for the produce needed to support a court and royal administration which may, judging by the evidence of Linear B inscribed tablets found at Knossos, have numbered more than 4,000 people. The deductions The famous Greek myth of Theseus, the Minotaur, and the Labyrinth contains two interesting clues about Minoan civilisation and its relationship with mainland communities. First, the Labyrinth itself seems to have been some sort of folk memory of the great palace revealed by Evans’ excavations. Second, at the heart of the fable is the requirement that Athens send seven boys and seven girls to Crete every nine years to be eaten by the Minotaur. This may represent a former tributary relationship between Athens and Knossos. What is certain is that the archaeology of Knossos strongly implies a tributary economy based on maritime power. The development of a hieroglyphic script (Linear A) to inscribe clay documents is evidence for a complex bureaucracy.

Though Linear A, the true Minoan script, has not been deciphered, Linear B, used by the Mycenaeans and represented in the latest layers at Knossos, has been. These texts undoubtedly amount to the ancient equivalent of modern tax records. The location of Crete, the myth of the Minotaur, the richness of Knossos, and the spread of Cretan artefacts across the Eastern Mediterranean all argue for a central role for the Minoans in Middle Bronze Age trade. It seems reasonable to suppose mercantile wealth supported a strong navy able to impose tributary relationships on satellite states like Bronze Age Athens. This article is an extract from the full article published in World Archaeology Issue 51. Click here to subscribe Evans at Knossos Evans at Knossos Biography of Arthur Evans Arthur Evans (1851-1941) was born into a well-to-do family; his father was an eminent archaeologist and collector. After taking a degree in Modern History at Oxford, Evans travelled widely in northern and eastern Europe. In 1877, Evans became Balkan correspondent for the Manchester Guardian.

When he married Margaret Freeman, the following year he and his wife set up house in Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) on the Dalmatian coast. In 1883 Evans and his wife went to Greece, where they met Schliemann and heard about his work at Mycenae and other Mycenaean sites. When Evans became Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford) in 1884, he announced that his goals were to broaden archaeology beyond the classical period, and to collect and display a wider variety of ancient material. Federico Halbherr on a horse (1984). ï¿½ De Luca In 1892 Evans visited Rome, where he met Federico Halbherr, who had been working on ancient inscriptions in Crete (see Unit 3 Session 2 for further detail). Evans' wife died prematurely in 1893 and it was not until 1894 that Evans made his first momentous visit to Crete. He had become interested in Aegean writing systems, through collecting engraved gems and seals for the Ashmolean.

Evans visited the site of Knossos, and proposed to the local Cretan Archaeological Council that he would buy the land and excavate the site himself. Drawing by the American diplomat William Stillman of part of Kalokairinos’ excavation, with a drawing of the Labyrinth on a later coin of Knossos (1881). Knossos was already known to be a rich source of archaeological information. Pococke had seen the (scanty) standing remains (see Unit 2 Session 1 Lesson 2), and in 1878 Minos Kalokairinos, from the nearby city of Herakleion, had dug trenches in what was later identified as the west wing of the palace (identifying the remains as those of the ancient Labyrinth). Portrait of Sir Arthur Evans by Sir William Blake Richmond. Courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Schliemann too had wanted to dig at Knossos and had made some soundings there in the 1880s. He had obtained an excavation permit from the Turkish authorities in Crete, but had not been able to make a suitable financial arrangement with the landowner.

In Evans' case it was the political situation on Crete that prevented the start of his own work at Knossos. The Cretans were still waging their own War of Independence against the Ottoman Turks. The Turks left the island in 1898 and new Cretan government was established (see also Unit 1 Session 3 Lesson 4 for the history; Unit 2 Session 3 Lesson 3 for further information on a massacre outside Herakleion in 1898). But by early 1900, Evans had acquired both the Knossos site and an excavation permit, and work began on 23 March. Photo of Iosiph Hadjidakis on a horse (1984). ï¿½ De Luca Iosiph Hadjidakis began excavating Minoan villas at Tylissos near Herakleion, while Stylianos Xanthoudides excavated Minoan tombs at Koumasa in the Mesara plain to the south. The Italians under Halbherr and Pernier began work at the Minoan palace of Phaistos and the villa at Hagia Triadha.

Americans Harriet Boyd, Edith Hall and Richard Seager dug in east Crete at sites such as Kavousi, Gournia and Pseira. The French worked at the Graeco-Roman site of Lato, and eventually started excavating the Minoan palace at Malia in 1915. Other British archaeologists, such as D. G. Hogarth, R. M. Dawkins, and R. C. Bosanquet, dug at sites in central and eastern Crete, such as the cave of Psychro, the Minoan peak sanctuary of Petsopha, Palaikastro, and Kato Zakro. By the time Evans began work at Knossos, he had already realised from the finds that had come his way that the culture of prehistoric Crete was different from that of the Mycenaean mainland, so different as to be 'non-Hellenic' in his eyes. He had therefore coined the term 'Minoan' to describe early Cretan culture. What Evans found at Knossos confirmed this view.

The monumental structure, which he called the Palace of Minos, with its elegant architecture; the bright, exuberant wall-paintings and pottery; the 'engraved tablets' in what came to be called Linear B - all these were different from anything that had been seen before. Evans worked hard to complete the excavations (1900-1905), and to publish them, chiefly in the six volumes called The Palace of Minos at Knossos. Page from Evans’ 1900 notebook showing drawings of some of the objects found beneath the floor of Magazine III (1983). Manolis Akoumianakis, Evans’ local foreman at Knossos. His local foreman, Manolis Akoumianakis, was an important part of the work. Caricature of Sir Arthur Evans by Piet de Jong (1924). From R. Hood, Faces of Archaeology in Greece. R.

Hood notes that ‘the background to this cartoon was occasioned by the finding of the House of the Frescoes in 1923 with its great stack of painted wall plaster … Piet somewhat wickedly has placed the raised forepaw [of the monkey] to echo the position of Evans’ own right hand.’ Evans was referred to by his right-hand man behind his back as ‘that monkey’. It is easy to criticise Evans now, and indeed he was wrong about some important issues - he could never accept that the relationship between Minoan Crete and the Mycenaean mainland changed from Minoan cultural pre-eminence of the Aegean to Mycenaean administration of Crete including Knossos. He also made mistakes in some of the restorations he undertook at Knossos - but he made them not to aggrandise himself and his work, but to make the structures safe to excavate and visit. Evans remains the major figure in the prehistoric archaeology of Crete, for his vision and for his determination to bring the results of his work into the public arena.

Further Reading Title: The Discovery of the Greek Bronze Age Year: 1995 Palace of Minos | Article about Palace of Minos by The Free Dictionary Palace of Minos | Article about Palace of Minos by The Free Dictionary Related to Palace of Minos: Cnossus , Palace of Knossos Knossos or Cnossus (both: nŏs`əs), ancient city of Crete, on the north coast, near modern Iráklion. The site was occupied long before 3000 B.C., and it was the center of an important Bronze Age culture. It is from a study of the great palace, as well as other sites in Crete, that knowledge of the Minoan civilization Minoan civilization , ancient Cretan culture representing a stage in the development of the Aegean civilization. It was named for the legendary King Minos of Crete by Sir Arthur Evans, the English archaeologist who conducted excavations there in the early 20th cent. ..... Click the link for more information. has been drawn. The city was destroyed c.1700 B.C.

(possibly by earthquake, perhaps by invasion) and was splendidly rebuilt only to be destroyed again c.1400 B.C., possibly by an earthquake, by invaders from the Greek mainland, or both. This marked the end of Minoan culture. The palace was restored by Sir Arthur Evans Evans, Sir Arthur John, 1851–1941, English archaeologist. He was (1884–1908) keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. From 1900 to 1935 he conducted excavations on the Greek island of Crete, principally at Knossos, and there uncovered the remains of a previously ..... Click the link for more information. , the English archaeologist who excavated (1900–35) the site. Based on fragmentary evidence, his reconstructions have proved to be controversial, as have the celebrated Knossos frescoes whose fragmentary remains were extensively restored by artists in the 1920s. Knossos later became an ordinary but flourishing Greek city, and it continued to exist through the Roman period until the 4th cent. A.D.

In Greek legend it was the capital of King Minos Minos , in Greek mythology, king of Crete, son of Zeus and Europa. He was the husband of Pasiphaë, who bore him Androgeus, Glaucus, Ariadne, and Phaedra. Because Minos failed to sacrifice a beautiful white bull to Poseidon, the god caused Pasiphaë to conceive a lustful ..... Click the link for more information. and the site of the labyrinth. The name also appears as Cnosus and Knossus. Bibliography See Sir A. J. Evans, Palace of Minos (4 vol., 1921–35); L. Cottrell, Bull of Minos (1953); L. R. Palmer, A New Guide to the Palace of Knossos (1969); C. Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (2009). Knossos , Cnossus a ruined city in N central Crete: remains of the Minoan Bronze Age civilization

Question: Which archaeologist is famed for excavating the palace of Minos, Crete between 1900 and 1908?
Answer: Sir Arthur John Evans