Political Geography and Palatial Crete

Abstract

The political geography of Crete during the period of the Bronze Age palaces has been a subject of widespread debate, not only with respect to the timing of the island’s move towards greater social and political complexity, but also with regard to the nature of the political institutions and territorial configurations that underpinned palace-centred society, as well as their longer-term stability over the course of the second millennium bc. As such, the region provides an ideal context in which to consider the broader question of how we develop robust political geographies in pre- and protohistoric contexts. This paper proposes the need for a more deliberate interlocking of computational, comparative and material approaches, as a means of guiding our political model-building efforts.