Simon Jusseret

Geoarchaeology

AEGIS Researcher

PhD Title

11-May-11 Neolithic and Bronze Age Coastal Landscapes in Crete: A Geoarchaeological Approach

Neolithic and ‘Minoan’ Bronze Age periods of Crete have since recently been understood in contradictory terms, the first one representing the long, mainly static introduction to the second, bearing witness of the rise of the ‘first European civilisation’. As a consequence, different interests came to frame human-environment understandings of the Neolithic (subsistence, security) and the Bronze Age periods (ritual practices; volcanic, earthquake, tsunami, flash-flood hazards). Coastal plains represent high-resolution archives of Holocene sedimentary records offering the possibility of examining Neolithic and Bronze Age human-environment interactions. The detailed examination of coastal plain sediment successions can document a wide range of interactions between humans and the earth. Sediments are not only environmental proxies. They also form material conditions of life, framing social practices and the rhythms of their expression.