The Aegean Bronze Age

"Ex oriente nigri: "Captain of the Blacks" and the Fabrication of the Minoan Culture

The fabrication of the Minoan culture is the specifically modern phenomenon, closely linked to the imperial and colonial conquest and appropriation of Ancient Greece. The Greek war of independence created an arena in which Europe could take part in the fight for its cradle. In the postcolonial key, the paper situates the fresco "Captain of the Blacks" into the context of the fabrication of the Minoan culture and the colonial narratives inscribed into it. In the beginning of the 20th century, this colonial past of the notion, known today as the Minoan culture, played a major role in the definition of the European past, present and future. The Minoan culture, as a colonial discursive formation in archaeology, has remained in the framework of the culture-histori-cal paradigm, but beyond it as well. The paper argues that the reconstructionof the fresco "Captain of the Blacks" in the works of Arthur Evans is the consequence of the colonial racism, putting the emphasis on the colour of the skin as a racial/ ethnic category. The interpretation that the dark-skinned figures are of the African origin has rarely been questioned, but rather perpetuated as a given.

Key words: Minoan culture, racism, "Captain of the Blacks", Egypt,colonialism, post-colonial perspective"

La présente contribution vise à préciser les aspects géographiques et chronologiques liés à l’apparition, au développement et au déclin d’un type de construction en pierre sèche localement appelée « torre ». Ces édifices monumentaux, qui présentent une forme de tour tronconique, sont élevés selon un cahier des charges architectural précis, et trouvent leur strict équivalent en Sardaigne avec les milliers de nuraghi monotorre du Bronze ancien et moyen. La publication du détail du maigre corpus des torre de Corse, ainsi que la révision des données chronologiques fournies par les fouilles et les prospections opérées ces cinquante dernières années, seront également l’occasion de souligner l’importance prise par ces monuments dans l’évolution de la construction du discours archéologique depuis les années 1960 et les travaux de Roger Grosjean.

“Minoans” have been recognised from the very
discovery of the palaces on Crete as an enclosed
ethnic group in the material assemblage known as
the “Minoan” culture. They were defined as a race
or an ethnic group and continued to be viewed so
in the tradition of the cultural-historical archaeology.
The Theban 18th Dynasty tomb representations
of the Aegean figures played a large role in defining
the “Minoans” as an ethnic group argued to be
represented in the Egyptian imagery. This is how a
cultural-historical construct of an ethnic group –
the “Minoans” was labelled with an Egyptian term
kftjw and both terms were taken to refer to an
Aegean Bronze Age ethnic group with no doubt.
This paper aims to disentangle kftjw from the
“Minoans” by analysing the history and the process
of this entanglement in the Aegean Bronze
Age archaeology and Egyptology. Therefore the
representations of the Aegean figures and the
terms related to them will be analysed on the basis
of the offered disentanglement. Egyptian tomb
imagery and the representations of foreigners are
formed with decorum, ideology and culturally
particular world view and topography. This paper
thus offers an entanglement based on the New
Kingdom Egyptian cultural topography beyond
ethnicity.

By adopting the chaîne opératoire approach as a dynamic theoretical and methodological framework for studying ancient technologies, this paper investigates the modalities behind the appearance of the potter's wheel in the Aegean during the Early Bronze Age II . Based on the comparative examination of ceramic assemblages from different Aegean sites, an extended technological study has been carried out in order to track the earliest wheel-made pottery and reconstruct the craft behaviours perpetrated by the use of the potter's wheel across the Aegean. The paper presents the results of this multi-site study and aims to (a) trace out the wheel-based technological traditions, (b) explore the contexts of the learning and transmission of the new tool, (c) shed light on the connectivity among Aegean and western Anatolian communities that enabled the transfer of the new craft knowledge, and, finally, (d) bring into view the mechanisms behind its emergence and appropriation. By considering technologies as representing an entire social system of knowing, perceiving and acting on the material world, it will be argued that the spread of the potter's wheel in the Aegean does not reflect a moment of linear diffusion of a technological innovation, adopted thanks to certain techno-functional advantages. Instead, it discloses the resilience of social identities and values embedded through the practical engagement of individuals in the production of their material culture. The potter's wheel, in fact, emerges as a socially and culturally mediated practice, specific to small groups of potters trained within a technological tradition of Anatolian origin, performing their craft in the Aegean socio-cultural milieus. Furthermore, its transfer reveals a multidirectional and dynamic crossing of material cultures that designated a navigable world where traditions, objects and people travelled, mixed and merged in unpredictable ways.

Three Cycladic figurines in the Syros Museum (SM) Prehistoric Collection, are published here. They are a complete figure of the Dokathismata variety (SM 356, pls. 1-2) and two fragmentary ones combining features of the Spedos and Dokathismata varieties (SM 358, pls. 3-4, SM 377, pls. 5-6). The three figurines are of unknown provenance, but the circumstances of their confiscation indicate that they are products of looting and not forgeries.
Two of these figurines, SM 356 and SM 377, have an apparently swollen abdomen, suggesting pregnancy. Most of the Cycladic female figurines, including those representing women in a pregnant or post-parturition state, derive from graves. This might reflect the increased mortality of women during these phases of their life.
The fear for the mortality of women would be important to the Early Cycladic islanders on a personal and a community level, not only because of a demographic problem, which cannot be proven on the basis of the available evidence, but also for another reason. Women needed to play multiple roles, since the biologically more powerful male members of the community, had to be away from home for long period of time voyaging with their longboats which had no sails. The archaeological evidence shows more and more connections of the Cyclades to the whole of the Aegean during the 3rd millennium BC.

The pottery of the Volcanic Destruction Level at Akrotiri falls into an identical pattern of wares within each building. The pattern is shown most clearly in the West House pottery, as the building has been completely excavated and the study of the material is well advanced. The West House pottery group includes all the various types of local and imported wares of the Volcanic Destruction Level, which date the final phase of the house to the 'mature' Late Minoan IA.
The West House is the only building in which systematic stratigraphic research is being carried out. The pottery deposits below the floors of the final phase indicate the first phase of the building. This earlier phase overlaps chronologically with an early stage of Late Minoan IA.
The rather fragmentary evidence from the other buildings on the site, when looked at in the light of the research in the West House, suggests that the whole settlement of Akrotiri entered its last period of occupation, divided into two phases, in the Late Middle Cycladic era.