Minoan Kato Zakro: a Pastoral Economy

Abstract

This thesis considers how the harbour town of Kato Zakro and the region east of the Bay of Siteia might have made a living in the period MMII-LMIB, c 1850-1490 BC. It is based on a review of the literature and on four visits to the region between 2000 and 2004. During these visits I walked much of the countryside between Kato Zakro, Palaikastro, Xerokampos and Ziros. I have taken a"bottom up" approach, starting with the natural landscape of the region and the material evidence of its modification in the Minoan period. An early conclusion is that Kato Zakro's success as a port depended on pastoralism and the export of textiles to Egypt and elsewhere. The pastoral economy of the region is then seen to determine a political structure more consistent with the heterarchical local management of community life than with a hierarchy of kings and exploitative elites. The palace at Kato Zakro is interpreted in this context as a commercial and community centre rather than a royal residence with predominantly religious functions. In the countryside, I reinterpret the Minoan built landscape of roads and associated structures as aspects of specialised pastoralism and transhumance rather than defence. I take into account the ways in which 20th and 21st century pastoralists in the region have used the roads for the management of summer and winter grazing, and make comparisons with modern ethnographic studies from the Lasithi region. Peak sanctuaries in East Crete are also interpreted as aspects of pastoral life, but with the additional function of measuring time and space through astronomical observations, for the purposes of sea navigation and farming calendars. The evidence of a Linear A administration system at Kato Zakro is similarly interpreted as indicative of commercial record-keeping and correspondence. In this way both the peak sanctuaries and the administration system are closely tied to the way in which the region made its living. A theoretical framework is necessary if the relative merits of competing interpretations are to be measured. The deductive hypothesis on which my interpretation of the evidence is based is Darwinian evolution and its current applications in anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, economics and philosophy. I analyse the ways in which archaeologists have developed theory on the basis of Spencerian and Darwinian evolution, and reconsider the post-processualist rejection of evolution as an explanation for archaeological data. Finally I measure my pastoralist interpretations of the material evidence against modern evolutionary theory. In particular, this allows me to rely on the character of the local environment and on constants in human nature that broadly determine adaptive behaviour over time in that environment. For Kato Zakro and East Crete, the evolutionary approach has led me to reject a number of interpretations based on assumed island-wide coherence and uniformity, for instance in political structure, which do not take proper account of regional variations in the material evidence. Note on sources, January 2006 This thesis was submitted in February 2005, but not returned until the following November. I have acknowledged sources brought to my attention by my examiners, and some accidental finds, but have not otherwise researched the most recent literature.