Carl Knappett

The Theran eruption and Minoan palatial collapse: new interpretations gained from modelling the maritime network

What was the effect on Late Minoan civilisation of the catastrophic destruction of Akrotiri on Thera (Santorini) by volcanic eruption? Not much, according to the evidence for continuing prosperity on Crete. But the authors mobilise their ingenious mathematical model (published in Antiquity 82: 1009–1024), this time to show that the effects of removing a major port of call could have impacted after an interval, as increased costs of transport gradually led to ever fewer routes and eventual economic collapse.

Using Statistical Physics to Understand Relational Space: a case study from Mediterranean Prehistory

Spatial relationships among entities across a range of scales are fundamental in many of the social sciences, not least in human geography, physical geography, and archaeology. However, space has received a surprisingly uneven treatment; in archaeology, for example, spatial analysis only really came to the fore in the 1960s and 70s, through the influence of the ‘New Geography’ (Haggett, 1965; Chorley & Haggett, 1967). David Clarke (1968, 1977), one of the principal exponents of spatial analysis in New Archaeology, described three levels of resolution in spatial archaeology: the micro level, the semi-micro or meso level and the macro level, the last of these representing relationships between sites (Clarke, 1977, p. 13). Yet, despite the clear implication that these levels should articulate, many subsequent studies have tended to aim at just one level. World-systems theory, for example, forms the basis for core-periphery models that examine macro-level spatial relationships (e.g., Schortman & Urban, 1992; Peregrine, 1996; McGuire, 1996; Chase-Dunn & Hall, 1997; Stein, 1998; Kardulias, 1999). While Clarke’s emphasis on different spatial scales has the advantage of clarity, his general approach, and indeed that of much spatial analysis of this kind, has been criticized for its overly deterministic approach to space. The idea that space has absolute geometric properties has been increasingly challenged by scholars arguing that space is a relative construct, a process that emerges out of social practices. In geography this critique already has a long history (e.g., Harvey, 1973), which has been taken up by increasingly diverse and influential voices (e.g., Lefebvre, 1991; Harvey, 1996; Soja, 1996; Thrift, 1996; Hetherington, 1997; Murdoch, 2006). This ‘spatial turn’ has also been experienced in archaeology, where approaches to space were ‘relationalized’ through the influence of phenomenology in landscape studies (Bender, 1993; Tilley, 1994; Knapp & Ashmore, 1999; Smith, 2003; Blake, 2002, 2004).

Interactions In Space For Archaeological Models

In this article, we examine a variety of quantitative models for describing archaeological networks, with particular emphasis on the maritime networks of the Aegean Middle Bronze Age. In particular, we discriminate between those gravitational networks that are most likely (maximum entropy) and most efficient (best cost/benefit outcomes).

Human Mobility and Technological Transfer in the Prehistoric Mediterranean

In this introduction to the volume we argue that the later prehistory of the Mediterranean has much to contribute to current debates in the humanities on the subject of mobilities. Although often avoided or maligned for its association with migration as an outmoded explanation for culture change, mobility is belatedly finding its way back into archaeological interpretation. We propose that the papers assembled here effectively bring out the range of mobilities in later Mediterranean prehistory, with a particular focus on the circulation of technological knowledge at different scales. The New Mobilities Paradigm With this book we aim to foreground mobility as a fundamental condition of ancient societies. Archaeology identifies instances of mobility in the past as a matter of course; and yet there is a lack of explicit thinking about the range of forms of mobility, and their effects upon society. While our outlook is distinctively archaeological, as we will show, important lessons can be learnt from neighbouring disciplines. Indeed, there is a fresh focus on mobility in the social sciences; it has even been called a new paradigm ( Sheller and Urry 2006 ), or a ‘mobility turn’ ( Cresswell 2011 ). Clifford ( 1997 ) is often cited as the key voice inciting this move, with his call for a focus on ‘routes’ and not just ‘roots’, that is to say, acknowledging movement and mobility as inherent, and not just an adjunct: “cultural centres, discrete regions and territories, do not exist prior to contacts, but are sustained through them, appropriating and disciplining the restless movements of people and things” ( Clifford 1997 , 3). This call has been instrumental in generating an open analysis of globalisation, a necessary reaction to a ‘sedentarist’ perspective that has supposedly afflicted disciplines like geography, sociology and anthropology. With significant input from human geography (and see the new journal Mobilities , for example), the focus is very much on contemporary life, and is innovative as a framework in a number of ways.

Mobility and Early Bronze Age Southern Aegean Metal Production

Metal production in the southern Aegean dates back at least to the Final Neolithic (Coleman 1977, 3-4). Present evidence, however, suggests that during the ensuing Early Bronze Age (EBA: c. 3 millennium BC), production of copper, lead, and silver is attested in the Aegean on a large-scale – in the context of this period for the first time, supplying the metal for the majority of artefacts consumed in the region (Gale and Stos-Gale 2002; Stos-Gale and Gale 2003). Interestingly, for copper at least, this local production largely ceases in the following Bronze Age periods, a phenomenon supported both through lead isotope analysis and through archaeometallurgical fieldwork. This paucity of copper production is presently attributed to the limited scale of relevant southern Aegean, particularly Cycladic, mineralisations and their possible exhaustion at the end of the third millennium BC, coupled with availability of metal from elsewhere (Bassiakos and Tselios 2012).

Resisting Innovation? Learning, Cultural Evolution and the Potter’s Wheel in the Mediterranean Bronze Age

Although the use of neo-Darwinian models to explain culture change has become quite common in some subfields of archaeology, there remains much resistance within ‘interpretive’ archaeologies to what is perceived as the simplistic ‘biologisation’ of culture. Some recent work has sought to build bridges between evolutionary and interpretive archaeologies, with the topic of ‘learning’ emerging as a useful middle ground between these two standpoints. Yet significant barriers remain to a more thorough integration. Here I identify what appear to be two such barriers: one is the continued commitment in neo-Darwinian approaches to a Cartesian notion of ‘information’ and the second is the related adherence to the idea of distinct cultural ‘traits’. I draw on work in cognitive science and developmental biology that places heavy emphasis on the distributed and contextual nature of learning, such that the uptake of an innovative technology cannot be reduced to a process of information transfer for learning a new trait. A distributed and developmental approach is put into play through a case study tackling the variable regional and temporal adoption of the potter’s wheel across the Bronze Age east Mediterranean.

Comments: Material Culture, Landscapes of Action, and Emergent Causation: A New Model for the Origins of the European Neolithic

After a century of research, there is still no widely accepted explanation for the spread of farming in Europe. Top-down explanations stress climate change, population increase, or geographic diffusion, but they distort human action reductionistically. Bottom-up explanations stress the local, meaningful choices involved in becoming a farmer, but they do not account for why the Neolithic transition in Europe was so widespread and generally unidirectional. The real problem is theoretical; we need to consider the transformative effects of human–material culture relationships and to relate humans, things, and environments at multiple scales. This article views the Neolithic as a set of new human-material relationships which were experimented with variably but which had unintended consequences resulting in an increasingly coherent, structured, and narrowly based social world. This interplay of local human action and emergent causation made the Neolithic transition difficult to reverse locally; the Neolithic was easy to get into but hard to get out of. On the continental scale, one consequence of this was its slow, patchy, but steady and ultimately almost complete expansion across Europe. As a metamodel, this accommodates current models of the local origin of farming while linking these to emergent large-scale historical patterns.

Unpublished Middle Minoan and Late Minoan I material from the 1962–3 excavations at Palaikastro, East Crete (PK VIII)

Results of excavations in 1962–3 at the Minoan coastal town of Palaikastro were published in the Annual in 1965 and 1970, as PK VI and PK VII. While those publications did report on all excavated contexts, in some cases this took the form of a preliminary report pending fuller study. The current paper (PK VIII) fills in most of the main gaps, particularly where the Middle Minoan period is concerned, but also with some attention to the Early and Late Minoan periods. Contexts and deposits from different blocks in the town are presented, as well as from outside the main town towards the area known as Sarantari. These provide good evidence for the existence of particular phases of occupation in the town, notably throughout the Middle Minoan period (MM IA, IB, II, IIIA and IIIB), as well as in EM IIB and LM IB. Some of these phases are not very well known at Palaikastro, or in east Crete more generally. This paper thus contributes to a fuller characterisation of certain ceramic phases at the level of both the site and the region, as well as supplementing our knowledge of the long-term occupation of this important coastal town throughout the Middle Bronze Age.