Paper abstract
The Early Iron Age-Archaic transition in Crete: the evidence from recent excavations at Azoria, Eastern Crete
- Haggis Donald C. - Mook Margaret S.
The paper presents the goals and results of excavations at the Early Iron Age and Archaic site of Azoria in northeastern Crete. Recent excavations at the site (2002-2006) demonstrate that the seventh century B.C. was an important period of culture change in which the Early Iron Age landscape was substantially transformed. The formalization of civic architecture and the reorganization of civic and domestic space are linked to the changing economics of food provisioning in the civic sphere and differentiation of processing and consumption patterns in various domestic and civic contexts. Public places such as an andreion, temple, and an early civic banquet hall were communal, but each was also to some degree exclusionary, serving to order the status of households and clans, and modes of social interaction. New civic buildings seem to form new contexts for elite consumption, negotiating political power, and asserting or claiming social identity in the early city. The paper focuses on the diachronic changes in the formal structure of the site, economic systems, and social organization from the Early Iron Age until the establishment of the city in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.
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