John Bintliff
It is a great treat as well as a notable honour to be invited by my friend Angelos Chaniotis to write an introduction to the remarkable volume you see before you. The treat met me as soon as I started reading the very first contribution, and stayed with me to the final offer-ing in this large and rich collection of essays. The honour lies in beoffer-ing asked to comment and reflect on work of such importance and interest, generally by younger scholars who are bringing to our attention data and interpretations that are both usually a quantum leap beyond the horizons I was aware of as a young postgraduate exploring the research frontier of Cretan archaeology in the early 1970's. Not all that is presented here, how-ever, is completely novel, and whereas the accumulation of empirical data is more clearly directional, there are obvious signs that theories tend to be cyclical. The latter observation seems appropriate also for the wider world of contemporary archaeological theory, where current interest in topics such as style, symbol and aesthetic experience reflects an uncon-scious revival of older approaches within the Culture-Historical and Art-Historical tradi-tions of the discipline.
I would like to offer my reflections on each chapter in their published order, during which I can also pull together some overview comments that arise from consideration of the content of the volume as a whole.
Kostas Sbonias deals with the later stages of Pre-Palatial society in Bronze Age
Sbonias, in my view, rightly downscales the kind of political units that seem to suit the evidence available for the pre-palatial era. Competitive villages with many lesser places around them and perhaps partially dependent on them, with a handful of 'fat villages' such as Knossos and Phaistos in a similar role for the larger village class, should reflect a society where very many communities and their leading families negotiate status and power amongst each other, but no island-wide chiefdoms or closed power systems exist — at least until the final pre-palatial stage when exactly that kind of rigidity seems to take over.
There are several occasions throughout this volume when maybe a glance outside of Aegean archaeology could have been enlightening. In terms of the model just outlined, one is certainly reminded of the spatial models of Kent Flannery for Formative Meso-america (1976), where early farming village strings along zones of fertile land develop into settlement hierarchies through the privileged expansion of one particular village per cluster, in which latter ultimately monumental constructions tend to arise in the civil-izational process. There is also, closer to home, increasing evidence on the Mainland of Greece for a two-stage settlement evolution as the prelude to Mycenaean palatial civil-ization, with Neolithic and Early Bronze Age dispersion and mobility of farming populations shifting towards greater nucleation and territorial closure in the Middle and then early Late Bronze Ages — a scenario upon which the palaces clearly will build their regional organisation (Bintliff and Snodgrass, forthcoming). Having noted this, how-ever, I must add that Kostas Sbonias' knowledge, and deployment of, the total archaeo-logical evidence for pre-palatial Crete is exemplary, and the careful and intelligent way he picks structure out of the evidence helped convince me of the correctness and value of his reading of the trends becoming visible across this critical era in Cretan development.
Donald Haggis also treats of the Pre-Palatial era and the insights it can offer for the
subsequent rise of Minoan palatial systems. The rise of societal complexity is here monitored in a complementary way to Sbonias through the detection of networks for the production and distribution of specific classes of pre-palatial ceramics. Clearly, as he points out, earlier models of a society of self-sufficient farming villages must be abandoned. But in obvious contrast to the preceding chapter, Haggis sees these regional systems of settlement interconnectivity in terms of power, so that even as early as EM II there were "centralized authority ... regional organizations" on Crete. Nonetheless he acknowledges the recent critiques that have undermined the view that burials exhibit strong status divisions (Watrous), or that elite 'mansions' existed (Whitelaw and others).
some-times such settlements can develop unusual wealth — but not political power over its distribution network. Indeed it is now well-established that early farming societies throughout Europe and the Middle East, for millennia before statehood or even the marks of 'high culture', were characterised by a scenario of innumerable rural communities linked together by chains of exchange at several different spatial levels. Nonetheless, Haggis is surely right, as Sbonias, to underline the evident networking of pre-palatial Crete as a significant feature that could in some ways anticipate the power-networks of the subsequent palace systems. But if such systems also typify most early farming societies, without leading rapidly on to statehood, then we require rather more in the way of explanation.
To meet this possible requirement, Haggis turns to the religious and ideological sphere of pre-palatial life. Peak sanctuaries may now go back to EM II and were certainly a significant feature of the landscape in later pre-palatial times. Whereas recent comment-ators have categorised such monuments as peripheral to everyday life, or merely signs of the rise of the palaces (Cherry), Haggis would put them in the centre of economic life as well as symbolic life — since they mark out the zones of farming and pastoralism for settlements large and small across the entire Cretan landscape, and merge the sentiments of personal and communal space with those of religious presence. Those elites which Haggis believes, but Sbonias doubts, were in power during pre-palatial times, gained control of ritual networks as a first step towards centralisation of regional power at palace foci.
I find myself wholly in sympathy with many aspects of this vision — but so I might, since it formed one of the central elements in my own modelling of the transformation of pre-palatial society to that of the First Palaces, developing out of my participation in the Ayiofarango Survey (cf. Blackman and Branigan 1977; Bintliff 1977). I suggested during the late 1970's that the transference of ideological attention from tholoi and other burial forms to peak sanctuary cults might be seen in terms of the shift in anthropological terms from Redfield's Little or Folk Tradition into a Great Tradition which bound peasants into a more powerful nexus of ideological control relating to the rise of central power.
Sbonias' vision of competing large and larger villages amidst a halo of unimportant hamlets, taken together with Redfield's concept of Little Traditions being transformed into Great Traditions, and the way seals are seemingly reflecting status games between leading families both within and between villages, might offer a scenario where the 'sacred geography' of such societies provided regional and district theatres for similar power games, in the process of which a higher level of strategic inter-community alliances between certain families allowed the crystallisation of an altogether steeper and more rigid pyramid of power focussed on the largest villages/nascent palace centres.
The richness of Haggis' contribution is that it does encourage us to think more challengingly about all these central issues — even if it is not necessary to agree with his own favoured trajectory in every detail.
One final point where I feel a broader viewpoint is called for from beyond Minoan Crete is that of population levels. Haggis rightly points to the striking abundance of settle-ment traces in every corner of Crete during Middle Minoan times, remarking that nothing like it can be seen on the island till Late Roman times. As a field-survey person, I am always interested in questions of demographic density and its ebb and flow in a single landscape, but experience has made those of us who practise this craft more than a little cautious about how to transfer dots on maps into numbers of persons alive at one time. Now fortunately the resolution of Minoan pottery is very good, so that sites dated to the period of the Middle Minoan palaces belong to a period of a mere 300 years or so, very much the kind of timescale to which all subsequent historic eras can be narrowed down to using survey ceramics from surface sites. As a result it is reasonable to compare the density of MM sites to those for example of LM, or Classical-Hellenistic, and so on. But even if the Middle Minoan can appear more frequent, I am still wary of a direct compari-son. One major reason ignored in the dot per dot comparison is the relative nucleation of population. In general, for example, it seems from surveys in several parts of Greece that although there may be an extraordinary proliferation of rural sites in certain periods of history (for example in many regions in Classical, Hellenistic or Roman Imperial times), estimates of area make it abundantly clear that normally the Greek polis contained 70-80% of regional populations, far outweighing the contribution to population from the sur-rounding farm and hamlet sites that nonetheless dominate survey maps. I am not aware that such calculations have been made for Crete, but we should not forget the significant concentrations of population in the 60 or more important poleis of Classical Crete — a number all admit was way above the number of truly urban agglomerations in Minoan Crete.
To see the real changes in population cover we need to focus on single defined land-scapes and compare the 'sequent occupance' of the same units of arable, pastoral and harbour facility; Haggis advocates such an approach — especially itemising landscape packages of agricultural plains plus coastal access. Curiously none of the contributors to this volume make use of the remarkably precocious application of this model in a pioneer article on the long-term settlement dynamics of Eastern Crete by Lehmann in 1939 ('The Settlement Chambers of East Crete') — though to the editor's credit it is in his bibliogra-phy and footnotes !
Anna Michailidou adds to our wealth of new detail about the meaning of 'complex
interConnectivity, so here the multiple roles of weighing devices show a degree of manu-facturing sophistication and in other contexts standardised recording of quantities which sets the Aegean apart from the rest of Bronze Age Europe — not just in palatial times but also beginning in the times of the preceding 'high cultures' of the Early Bronze Age Aegean. What is very significant about the careful cataloguing of findspots are the insights Michailidou provides us with about the strong likelihood for separate usages of weighing — which opens up scope for the activities of independent or semi-independent manufacturers and merchants, alongside the recording of palace dues. This certainly reinforces the growing view that the Bronze Age Aegean economy was much more than merely the revenues and subsequent redistribution of the palaces and their putative pre-decessors in 'corridor mansions' and the like. On the other hand, Michailidou very sensibly points out how difficult it is to distinguish the hand of the palace, or an Early Bronze Age elite, in a workshop or 'private' house away from the recognisable centre, when most now accept also that palaces recorded goods that may never have been conveyed to the centre itself. Despite these complex problems, this chapter reveals the remarkable achievement of persistent and meticulous cataloguing and:source-critical analysis of categories of material culture bearing directly on the dynamics of production.
Eric Cline turns our gaze even further out from the Great Island to consider Cretan
trade links with the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean, focussing in particular on the Late Bronze Age. I found his contribution undoubtedly one of the most sensible and least dogmatic treatments I have read of the problems of understanding Aegean trade with the wider world, with a healthy dose of realism concerning the limitations (still) of our know-ledge. He begins with some detailed but no less important issues raised by recent dis-coveries. The highlighting of the port of Kommos as a vital source of information on Cretan trade, introduces a novel idea: as well as acting as a 'gateway community' for distributing trade goods into the rest of the island, so much more foreign produce has been found in the site itself than ever reaches its assumed hinterland markets, that it is suggested it was in itself a major point of consumption. This interestingly parallels recent thinking on the actual functioning of claimed 'ports of trade' in late Iron Age England and early Anglo-Saxon England. A second interesting point is the way Cline finds strong support in the trade evidence for preferring the earlier claimed date for the destruction of the last palace at Knossos, i.e., LM IIIA2.
point I personally wonder whether the terms have been so stretched as to begin to lose their value, suggesting that we should rethink our modelling process to build in the modifications at the start.
The same process seems to be happening with the related grand model of World Systems Theory. Cline prefers the more subtle and flexible approach of Kardulias, with multiple levels of interaction replacing a simple 'in or out' scenario tying regions to the dominant influence of other regions. The alternative systems of power or economic net-working implied by classic formulations of, respectively, 'world empire' as opposed to 'world economy', clearly do not suit the Aegean as a whole — either as a shorthand for relations between Minoan Crete and the Islands and Mainland, or for the relations of the Aegean as a whole towards the East Mediterranean states.
Very wisely and provocatively, Cline concludes by asking whether the many modi-fications Aegean realities seem to call for in both Core-Periphery and World Systems models call into question their value as heuristic shorthands — in the end are we merely saying that we are sure that international relations between the Aegean and the East existed?
What kind of alternative models might better express the growing complexity of inter-actions both within and beyond the Aegean? I have found the medieval historian Chris Wickham's way of setting out economic relations extremely helpful in such a situation (Wickham 1984). Wickham suggests that we need to organise any study of a specific regional society by looking at three separate areas of information regarding the dynamics ofthat society: 1) the nature and trajectory of regional agro-demographic cycles, shedding light on regional human ecology and even its relative 'health'; 2) the mode(s) of production operated at the local level; and 3) the mode(s) of production operating at the macro-regional level, i.e., in the economic relations between our region and a range of significant neighbouring regions. It is more than likely that there are sufficient semi or fully autonomous variables in each of these three areas to prevent any simple overarching scheme or nomenclature to characterise the economics of the region. The actual develop-ment of the region forms an unpredictable but post-dictable dialectic between the forms of economic life identified in each of our three spheres of analysis (for an application of this methodology to the divergent regional growth patterns in the Greco-Roman Aegean as revealed by archaeological survey, see Bintliff 1997).
Krzysztof Nowicki's study of the Cretan mountains, in particular the Lasithi Massif,
here Nowicki suggests some were 'part of the problem' and may have been active in piracy as well as sustaining a low level of trade around and out of the island. Nowicki however believes in concentrating on uncovering and commenting on the particular adaptations observable in a specific, closely studied district — in this case the Lasithi, long famous for the postulated refuge community of Karphi. Nowicki documents the new evidence for a whole series of comparable and often almost as extensive refuge sites in other, discrete pockets of the same massif at this time — all betraying the same emphasis on defensibi-lity.
Further deployment of ethnohistory comes in the analysis of the houses at Karphi. It seems a reasonable argument from house by house comparison with palatial-era houses at Gournia, that life in Karphi was impoverished — houses have smaller domestic space as well as poorer material culture overall. But allowance should be made — and Nowicki hints at this possibility — that in the closely-built up proto-urban plans of palatial-period nucleated sites working areas may have been incorporated into formal enclosures, where-as in the more 'rustic' plans of settlements such where-as Karphi, such activities could have occurred in the unenclosed areas between formal houses (a distinction observable today in Greek villages with denser or more open plans). One might also raise some doubts — also on the basis of what current research is revealing in the study of the history of Greek vernacular housing — about employing a static model of the use of space in rural houses. Nowicki is on reasonably safe grounds in using concentrations of pithos fragments to identify storerooms, but his imaginative reconstructions for the rest of the Karphi room uses rest on simple transference of recent house plans and makes no allowance for the variety of domestic spatial arrangements according to social and economic context.
Nonetheless one can only applaud the refreshing attempt to put economic life and so-cial forms into the walls of these remote (in time and place) Cretan settlements, and the same goes for the bold analysis of the subsistence economics of Karphi and the other refuge settlements of the Lasithi district. Sensible use is made of possible food needs, land uses, all compared with recent practice and older traditions recorded for the same landscape. One intriguing result for me was the guesstimate of 625-1000 people at Karphi: something missing from the volume as a whole was consideration of communal social organisation in cross-cultural perspective. When one considers this range of population we can note that such a large community has a quite different set of political and economic parameters to a village of say 200 people (Freeman 1968). Endogamy could be a dominant practice, with control over traditional resources far greater and institutionalised than in much smaller communities. In effect such a large community contains the potential to behave like an introverted city state (cf. Bintliff 1999) — what I have termed a 'proto-polis'.
abandoned, leaving plentiful opportunity for a lower population of herders to graze at will over the Cretan landscape without threat to anyone's livelihood. In practice, as the literature on Old World pastoralism shows very well, most antagonism between farmers and exotic herders - or the 'desert and the sown' in Middle Eastern terms, occurs when settled farming populations are very high and specialist, largescale herds pushed into marginal land.
Nowicki undertakes an excellent analysis of the land resources that may have been used by Karphi and other refuge communities. In so doing he argues that Catchment Ana-lysis would judge such refuge sites to be highly inefficiently placed, since often their resources were only reached well beyond the preferred one hour radius access from the village. Accepting such a view, one is tempted to ask whether exactly such a scenario could have led to the setting up of seasonal sites in those resource zones beyond an hour's distance, so as to make their exploitation more convenient at the appropriate times of year, e.g., for olive harvesting. Indeed one of the best-known features of Greek settlement history throughout the insecure 17th to 19th centuries AD was exactly the creation by upland villages of seasonal domestic sites in intermediate or deep lowland terrain (metochia, kalyvia) often for reasons of security. As noted above, depopulation would encourage such an extensive form of settlement and help compensate for the peripheral location of the main settlement to annual resource zones. Could Karphi and its like be a seasonal half of a settlement system?
If people in the rolling hill-country from Herakleion to Phaistos were able to stay in closer contact to their former lands by making less dramatic relocations to defensible hills, as Nowicki argues, one wonders why the less economically-advantageous true uplands were so popular. Later history would certainly argue for the Lasithi solution: in my own study region of Boiotia, in central Mainland Greece, pirates swept far inland across coastal plains and adjacent hill and plateau country in the 14th-15th and later 17th centuries AD, causing largescale village abandonments in favour of less accessible mountain and mountain foothill village refuge sites (cf. Bintliff 1995). An interesting contrast is found though with villages we believe to be associated with the 'Dark Ages' following the collapse of Roman control in the 7th-9th centuries AD: many villages remain in exposed lowland locations. Here it is argued that the population is — as we noted earlier for post-palatial coastal sites in Crete — 'part of the problem': the ethnic composition of these non-refuge sites is probably a merging of local people and invading Slav settlers — who have little to fear but themselves! Whether this holds lessons for divergent post-palatial settlement trajectories on Crete is worth some consideration.
a good case for suggesting that they point to increased pastoral activity, and probably over more extensive distances in terms of seasonal movement, than is the case for Classical times. It is his thesis that the intensification of upland pastoralism is a symptom and product of increasing socio-economic crisis in Crete, in which growing populations are unable to intensify arable use due to the constraints of the archaic, master-serf landuse system characteristic for Archaic to Hellenistic society in Crete. Two other methods of releasing peasant pressure were employed — aggressive expansion of one city across the territory of its neighbours, and increased use of marginal lands. Both approaches seem to appear in our sources to have typified life in Hellenistic Crete.
Of course everything is relative: we have earlier raised the unresolved question of actual population levels in Minoan and Classical-Hellenistic Crete, and it is a matter of im-portance to ask what kind of population density was common amongst the 60 or more city-states of Classical Crete. In the recent comparative analysis which I published on the varying development trajectories of the different regions of Greco-Roman Greece (Bintliff 1997), Crete stood in strong contrast to most other fertile regions of Greece in the early development of multiple independent poleis unmatched by a maximal spread of rural settlement. It was only in late Hellenistic and even more clearly in Roman Imperial times that the Cretan landscape sees the kind of ubiquitous proliferation of rural settlement long known for the Minoan palatial period.
Given that town life was also flourishing in Early Roman times, it seems likely that population overall grew very dramatically after Hellenistic times.
For Chaniotis it is the persistence of the Archaic oligarchic control over land and wealth that limits the economic development of Crete in Classical-Hellenistic times be-yond its dominant island autarchy. That was likewise my own conclusion, and it does compare interestingly with regional stagnation in the Mainland province of Messenia, where the strict control over production by the Spartan minority seems to have created economic stagnation and a failure in settlement expansion — broken with the later inde-pendence of the province. But why was it, to stay with our out-of-island comparisons and contrasts, that in the homeland of the Spartans themselves, survey shows a more typical explosion of rural sites in Classical-Hellenistic times? My own view was that the restrictions on serf freedom and the communal life of the minority free landowners on Crete inhibited economic expansion and wealth creation, with the inference that the breakdown of that peculiar social system would have released the valve of growth on the island's productive system. Chaniotis' analysis is compatible with this model, with the fissures that grow in the social system growing increasingly during Hellenistic times (increased territorial warfare, emigration of men for mercenary service or permanent settlement abroad, the search for resources via piracy or the intake of marginal land). As we shall see, many of these issues are also explored —- but from different viewpoints, by later chapters in Part II.
Didier Viviers indeed takes the view that Crete was far more involved with trade than
before Venetian and Ottoman times. Showing that trade crossed city boundaries and went in and out of the island tells us little about the scale of this trade; indeed since in many areas intra-island trade was easier by sea — it may well be that harbours were as import-ant for such relations as for international imports and exports. Added to these imponder-ables is the difficulty of mixing sources of varied dates — so that later Hellenistic re-cords may provide evidence for the breaking down of the traditional stagnant economics of Crete rather than insights into the 'normal' economic pattern of Archaic to early Helle-nistic times.
In Francesco Guizzi's chapter on private economic activities in Hellenistic Crete, more highly interesting epigraphic data appear on the way people conducted differing kinds of economic business across the island. The question appears again of production for local needs and for export — either across the island or even out of it. But at times the sources leave several options open: thus, although Guizzi rightly points out that extensive transhumance is a sign of large flocks, it does not follow that these need to be the proper-ty of a single great pastoral entrepreneur with a eye to distant markets — it could also be a logical amalgamation of many smaller flocks being taken by specialist shepherds to rich pastures distant from the home community, but with home consumption the ultimate goal. Guizzi also points out that the fission of Crete into so many competitive poleis and the un-certainties of Aegean climate meant that food shortages were common in individual poleis, encouraging permeable frontiers at regular intervals to allow food surplusses to flow into deficit areas. Guizzi's analysis focusses especially on the likelihood that it was a minority of wealthier producers who would have wanted to make use of treaties allowing some movement of food products to other regions of the island, and further that some of this surplus could well have found its way onto boats docking on Crete en route between other parts of the Mediterranean (e.g., from Egypt).
Manolis Stefanakis offers a fascinating review of the history of Cretan coinage in the
pre-Roman era. He supports the historical sources in a settlement of Aiginetans in Kydonia, which leads to a limited distribution of Aiginetan and then locally-overstruck Aiginetan coins, with the exception of the local mints in the unusually developed towns of Knossos, Phaistos and Gortyn — where city coinage appears in the 5th century BC. As with much of Greece outside of the precocious city states of the South-East Mainland and adjacent islands, and Ionia, local coins are a Hellenistic phenomenon, and Stefanakis sees most Cretans employing non-coin exchanges until that time — in his words a monetary mentality does not extend across Crete till Hellenistic times. Most authorities have attributed this breakthrough in the use and circulation of coins in Crete to mercenary pay, piracy and the growth of trade in the post-Classical centuries, a viewpoint which we have seen is consistent with many aspects of the evidence as presented in Chaniotis' chapter. Stefanakis prefers to see the coin hoards of Hellenistic times as those of merchants rather than mercenaries and raiders — but without explaining why. Another omission in the argument is the purposes to which coin was put, bearing in mind the role early coinage in Greece played in state payments as opposed to everyday market transactions at the peasant level; it would be helpful to hear more from numismatic specialists such as Stefanakis on the varying rates of production of coins of different values.
Antigone Marangou provides a fine overview of a major programme of investigation
changes in settlement and land use becomes apparent over the following two centuries. Communities can be seeing moving into better locations to maximise crop production, and to harbour locations for participation in a greatly-increased seaborne trade out from the island. At the same time a proliferation of villas associated with wine-presses and ceramic industries — producing both locally-consumed wares but especially transport amphorae for the export of wine — can be mapped in many regions of the island. A very strong case is made for the view that the Roman impact totally transformed the basic structure of the Cretan economy, and "allowed Crete to create a commercial vineyard and to make its wine production the real driving force of local economic life". As an archaeologist, I find such powerful and convincing evidence for land use change provides a vital aid to the interpretation of settlement changes, especially the appearance of villas in the context of Romanisation. The mapping of wine amphora waster dumps in areas now dominated by olives also emphasizes the historically-specific nature of the wine export boom; the inadequacies of Italian production, particularly as Rome's needs grew logarithmically in the early centuries AD, and the convenient location of Crete along the route of major shipping heading to Italy from the East Mediterranean, all favoured a commercial production for export. I am reminded of an exactly parallel development in the Eastern Adriatic, where rocky islands such as Hvar, but with excellent climates for wine and on busy shipping routes, witnessed vigorous economic growth and prosperity after incorporation into three different empires — that of Imperial Rome, and that of Venice and then Austro-Hungary — in all three eras a focus on export, especially of wine, follows incorporation.
Two problems do come to mind with this analysis, however, excellent though it is in its main conclusions. Firstly is the question — Chaniotis' again — of quantity and ba-lance in the economy. The key amphora-producing locations and inferred major wine ex-port zones (inland Lyttos excluded) are coastal — leaving much of the island in some un-clear form of economy. Who exactly is responsible for wine exports? Is it, for example, a minority of major villa-estate owners or a majority of farmers? What proportion of income on a typical Cretan estate derives from wine, as compared to other products? What is unclear is whether Marangou's statement quoted above refers to the Cretan economy as dominated in wealth-production by wine export, or whether 'the leading sector', i.e., the most valuable product, was wine. A neglected aspect of Romanisation which is surely relevant to a great development in wine production is the nature of the Roman tax system. Under Rome provincials were now obliged to pay taxes in cash — this meant farmers had to sell surplusses on the market to gain coin; wine as a cash crop may well have provided a major means to achieve this requirement. Bearing in mind also the postulated radical shift from a serf-economy to one dominated by free peasants, an increase in the productivity of a typical farm might well be expected, providing surplusses to feed external demand and a growing internal population. Todd Whitelaw has documented how on Kea the achievement of full peasant ownership in the Early Modern period is associated with pronouncedly increased investment in farm buildings and economic productivity (1991).
from Aegean ceramic studies (Abadie-Reynal 1989) and field survey evidence in many regions, that if anything, the decline of Italy from the 3rd century AD and its further eclipse after the sack of Rome provides a mirror image of decline to the rising population of the new capital at Constantinople and the adjacent Aegean region. Just as all the provinces of East and West sent fleets of boats to Italy in the Early Empire, so in the 4th-6th centuries AD the remaining provinces directed their fleets into the Aegean. Now all the coastal and island harbours that could form staging posts for these armadas gained by the ease with which their own surplusses could be added to passing shipping — arguably stimulating export production even in less favourable local environments. Crete had benefitted from its strategic location for boats heading towards Italy and Rome in the early centuries AD, now it was equally well-placed at the entry to the Aegean and the routes to the new capital.
Sara Paton and Rolf Schneider in their thorough and highly-impressive analysis of
foreign marbles in Roman Crete, add invaluable detail to the story of economic takeoff and internationalisation of the island. They rightly remind us that the ubiquitous deploy-ment of exotic stones for pillars and building facades not only reflects the earning power of the wealthy decurion class and villa estate owners on the island (native and immigrant), but served to create a new Roman appearance to both large parts of the monumental town-scape and the country villa. Once again, I wonder what happens after the period covered by these authors — indeed in quite a few cases undated but generally 'Roman' buildings are seemingly attributed to the 2nd-3rd centuries as if all fell apart afterwards. Given the archaeological evidence for a continuation of dense settlement in Late Roman times and the predilection of contemporary villa owners and the patrons of churches to use elaborate architecture and marble veneers throughout the East Mediterranean, it would be surprising if there was not major use of such materials after the 3rd century also.
The last of the major chapters is Martha Baldwin Bowsky'κ tremendous piece of scholarship on the prosopography of Roman Crete and its utilisation for economic in-sights. Following recent practice, Baldwin Bowsky employs onomastic detective work and through cross-referencing argues very convincingly for meaningful links between Italian senators and equestrians who develop business links in the Roman East and a con-siderable penumbra of clients adopting their names, who act in diverse ways to enhance those commercial activities — both immigrants into Crete and local people who adopt Roman names. The opening up of the Eastern Mediterranean to new forms of borderless trade encouraged many to settle in Crete — especially after the sack of Delos. Baldwin Bowsky argues well that links between lesser money-men, merchants, and artefact manu-facturers, and the core group of powerful Italian upper class politicians and entre-preneurs, traceable through epigraphy, allow us to follow major areas of a growing inter-national economy in which Crete is a very lively receiver and giver of products.
Harris), may well be true for certain sectors of the Cretan population — but how big was that population relative to the total productive population of Roman Crete? Partly in answer to such a question, Baldwin Bowsky does show us very clearly that many of the economic activities which Romanisation encouraged on Crete served for internal consumption, even including wine being shipped around the island itself as well as into true export.
One very doubtful claim which is held to explain what was going on in the large interior island zones for which little wine production and amphora production is attested, needs a firm rebuff: the suggestion that there was a climatic change in Greco-Roman times which left the mountains and inland plateau of little use except for herb growth! Current knowledge of the climatic history of the Mediterranean finds no convincing evidence for any prolonged phase of unusual climate between Classical and Early Roman times. One suspects that away from the coast many districts of Crete matched population growth with an expansion of subsistence products such as cereals and olives, and pastoral products; it would be interesting to see if the wealthier villas are mainly confined to the more profitable coastal vineyard zones. Once we begin to wonder if Crete was actually a mosaic of different land uses in Roman times, with largescale producers and middling to smallscale producers aiming for different kinds of market at varying target distances, and with differing kinds of crop balances according to local environment, access potential, then Baldwin Bowsky's bold postulate that Crete became "something approaching a single economic unit" under Rome becomes a matter for more than a little doubt.
Nonetheless the data and the models are wonderfully interesting and stimulating, and allow us to raise even deeper questions about the local complexities in ways undreamt of a generation ago.
The final and very short paper by Nikos Litinas presents an intriguing set of ostraca of Early Roman age from the port of Chersonesos, suggesting a record of rather large financial dealings. Baldwin Bowsky in her chapter takes this to be part of the great unifying trade system of Roman Crete, whereas Litinas is frankly unclear what kind of dealings they document.
In this way the collection illustrates what remains a frequent observation throughout this volume from its contributors — the empirical data are growing in breadth and depth and offer remarkable opportunities — in both history and prehistory — for detailed reconstructions of major facets of island life, and yet — the significance of the sample under study for the quantifiable realities of Cretan economics in each and every phase stays just beyond our reach. I am however, much more optimistic than W.V. Harris in his commentary — not least after reading this excellent volume — that we are moving steadily towards realistic quantifable reconstructions.
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