Geoarchaeological observations on the causes of the end of Minoan civilization

Abstract A geoarchaeological excursion to Greece in September 1994 allowed us to analyse the problem of the decline of Cretan or Minoan civilization in greater detail with visits to numerous archaeological sites and the examination of finds kept on Crete and at Thera and Athens. Every visitor to ancient Crete is enchanted by the level reached by Minoan civilization and by the mystery surrounding its sudden demise. It has even been attempted to connect the latter to a cataclysm - to which Plato1 refers - determining the disappearance under the sea of the island of Atlantis and the end of its very high civilization. It has practically become a real 'myth' in archaeology. Minoan civilization, which arose on Crete at the centre of the eastern Mediterranean, developed during the millennium from c. 2800 to 1450 B. C.3 At that time its influence extended over a large part of the Cycladic archipelago with a dense network of relations with the nearby peoples of the Middle East, Egypt and continental Greece. It is obvious from these 'international' relations that there was a powerful commercial and military fleet, as the well known frescoes from Akrotiri on the island of Thera still show today. Undoubtedly the Cretans must have been excellent sailors and merchants, characteristics of which ancient historians were aware4 and which made Crete famous in the whole Aegean basin during the Bronze Age. Even if military expansionism in general does not help in understanding the economy of a people, commercial expansionism however tells us that Crete based its relations with foreigners on the exchange of the products of its resources, mostly natural ones (e. g. oil and grain) and that it used local timber for ships and local stone for building: a clear indication of the intense use of the territory perhaps carried out shrewdly considering the level of civilization reached by this people that had writing and metallurgy, built cities and palaces and was renowned for its figurative arts. With the exception of Egypt and some parts of the Middle East, there were no other civilizations as developed at the time. By comparison it should be remembered that the populations of Italy were little more than modest farmers still living in villages of huts or in lakeside pile dwellings. One can say that the Minoans were at the centre of exchanges and traffic between the peoples of the civilised world giving on to the eastern Mediterranean basin, also because of their geographic position, exchanging usages, customs and culture. There can be no hesitation in considering that Crete produced the first developed civilization in Europe. The historiography of the beginning of the century even emphasised this aspect in a 'Europeanising' function. At the end of the Late Bronze Age this great civilization disappeared suddenly at its very height and at the time of its greatest expansion. There is a wealth of archaeological data on the subject. The causes of this unexpected disappearance remain unknown. Archaeological and historical studies take it for granted that the rising war-like Mycenaean civilization based in continental Greece prevailed over the 'Cretan empire'(The myth of Theseus and Ariadne is suggestive in this regard). Other studies consider that this military dominance took place only when the 'Minoan empire' was already in decline because of a violent eruption of the volcano on the nearby island of Thera in the Cycladic archipelago. Both solutions to the problem seem to be too deterministic, as they give too little space to other geological and environmental factors that could have changed the situation more drastically and even irreversibly. An on-site visit and an examination of the considerable literature on the Minoan 'material'have allowed us to gather sufficient archaeological and geological elements to form a more articulated scenario of the causes of the decline. This note will discuss principally some data that confirm the importance of the 'geological factor' in the end of this civilization.