State of Knowledge and Current Debates
The Production of Archaeological Knowledge on Crete
The archaeological remains of Crete first reached a wide audience through the accounts and drawings of Renaissance-era travelers, such as the Italian Cristoforo Buondelmonti. Later explorations built upon these works with, for example, Robert Pashley, Capt. Thomas Spratt, and Victor Raulin writing about the island’s botany, geology, peoples, and ancient ruins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (early travelers are summarized in Pendlebury 1939). The large-scale excavations of the English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans at the site of Knossos early in the twentieth century (following on from the oft-overlooked preliminary work by Minos Kalokairinos in the late 1870s) propelled Cretan archaeology into European, if not global, consciousness. Since then, over a century of continuous fieldwork has resulted in Crete becoming one of the best-explored islands in the Aegean region. Although it is...
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Further Readings
Beevor, A. 1991. Crete: The battle and the resistance. London: John Murray.
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Day, J. (2018). Crete, Archaeology of. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_1434-2
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