Introduction
The archaeological remains of Crete first reached a wide audience through the accounts and drawings of Renaissance era travellers, such as the Italian Cristoforo Buondelmonti. Later explorations built upon these works with, for example, Robert Pashley, Capt. Thomas Spratt, and Victor Raulin writing about the island’s botany, geology, peoples, and ancient ruins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The large-scale excavations of the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans at the site of Knossos early in the twentieth century propelled Cretan archaeology into European, if not global, consciousness. Since then, over a century of continuous fieldwork has resulted in Crete becoming one of the best-explored islands in the Aegean region. Although it is most famous for the Bronze Age “Minoan” civilization, named by Evans for the mythical king Minos who ruled from Knossos, the island has a long history of settlement, conquest, occupation, and resistance, leading to numerous...
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Further Reading
Beevor, A. 1991. Crete: the battle and the resistance. London: John Murray.
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- 2006. The Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age: continuity and change between twelfth and eighth centuries BC. London and New York: Routledge.
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Schoep, I. 2010. Making elites: political economy and elite culture(s) in Middle Minoan Crete, in D. Pullen (ed.) Political economies of the Aegean Bronze Age: 66-85. Oxford: Oxbow.
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Day, J. (2014). Crete, Archaeology of. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1434
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