The Past as Oral History

Abstract

The archaeology of Bronze Age Crete is a strange world. Inhabited by a mysterious ethnic group which was given the name, ‘Minoans’, it occupies an eminent position in the public imagination, where mythological elements are mixed with archaeological information and architectural and artistic representations, many of them created at the beginning of this century. Airports and tourist shops in the Mediterranean are full of books that have fictionalised the Europeanist, romanticised mythologies created mostly by Sir Arthur Evans but also by others who may not admit it, but have constructed a world, so familiar to their background and country of origins. Their Minoan constructions are full of palaces, kings, queens and aristocratic estates but also colonies, fleets and trade (cf. Bintliff 1984, MacEnroe 1995, MacGillivray 2000, Hamilakis, forthcoming, Hitchcock and Koudounaris forthcoming). In the 1970’s and most of the 1980’s, that strange world was filled in with redistributive centres, compassionate elites with amazing managerial powers and a spirit of public duty, specialist farmers with an amazing understanding of formalist microeconomics (e.g. Renfrew 1972, cf. Hamilakis 1995 for further bibliography). In the 1990’s, a few brave story-tellers started rewriting some of the stories using terminology which bewildered many and passed by the rest of old and the not so old guard: structure and agency, semiotics, gender. The ‘Minoans‘ are, to a large extent, still elusive, however, their materiality void, their experiential realm an empty space.