Alan Peatfield

Rural Ritual in Bronze Age Crete: The Peak Sanctuary at Atsipadhes

The Minoan mountain peak sanctuary of Atsipadhes Korakias (Rethymnon, Crete) was excavated by the author in 1989. This article presents the first published account of that excavation and addresses its contribution to broader issues, methodological and interpretative, of Cretan Bronze Age religion. The spatial distribution of over 7500 finds was recorded, enabling the detailed reconstruction of the use and function of the sanctuary. This reconstruction is compared with other approaches to the identification of prehistoric cult places in Greece. Of the other excavated peak sanctuaries, the best known are elite sanctuaries associated with palatial centres; Atsipadhes Korakias is a poor, rural sanctuary, and offers a counterbalanced perspective on Minoan peak sanctuaries.

Feeling Through the Body

The origins of this paper lay in an archaeological problem: the understanding of the variety of gestures of clay figurines we had excavated from a mountain peak sanctuary of the Cretan Bronze Age. As we discuss in greater detail below, such figurines from other peak sanctuaries, portraying the worshippers at the sanctuary, have been usually interpreted as representing gestures of worship, adoration, and supplication. While understandable within the conventions of applying familiar western religious norms to the reading of ancient religion, such an interpretation seemed to undervalue the essential physicality of the figurine gestures. Moreover the sanctuary findspot placed the physicality of the gestures firmly within the context of ritual action, the understanding of which has benefitted enormously from contemporary anthropological and archaeological interest in the body.

Dynamic Spirituality on Minoan Peak Sanctuaries

Previous work by the authors has argued for a shamanic element to Cretan Bronze Age religion. Late Minoan gold rings with engraved ritual scenes show clear affinities with imagery expressive of ecstatic religious experience in other ancient and traditional societies. We interpret the clay figurines from Minoan peak sanctuaries as similarly expressive of the participants’ spiritual experience, whereby the body was a medium to access altered states. The authors’ excavation of the western Cretan peak sanctuary of Atsipadhes Korakies is presented as a case study. Our work has been firmly located within current archaeological interest in the body, and in experiential and experimental methodologies. We also argue for the importance of a fully sensory archaeology, which engages with the dynamics of ritual and spirituality on these mountain shrines. In this chapter we explicitly address the issues raised by our own encounters and experimentation with shamanic practices in a Cretan context, particularly the apparent tension between objective and subjective analysis, and how that may be resolved.

‘Figures in 3D’: Digital Perspectives on Cretan Bronze Age Figurines

Abstract The largest corpus of clay figurines from the Cretan Bronze Age comes from ritual mountain sites known as peak sanctuaries. In this paper, we explore how the ‛Figures in 3D’ project contributes to our understanding of these figurines, aiding in the study of the technologies of figurine construction and the typological analysis of distinctive styles. We discuss how the project has, more unexpectedly, begun to create new dialogues and opportunities for moving between the material and the digital by taking a multifaceted approach that combines the data from 3D models and 3D prints with experimental work in clay.