It was on the island of Crete that the first advanced civilization on European soil emerged, around 2000 BCE & a fact that is still astonishing for modern observers and poses numerous puzzles for scholarship. The Minoans built monumental palaces in a region that was threatened by earthquakes, developed various writing systems, decorated their rooms with magnificent murals, promoted arts and crafts, and dominated the Aegean Sea with their ships. This book presents the success story of this ...

What is the social role of images and architecture in a pre-modern society? How were they used to create adequate environments for specific profane and ritual activities? In which ways did they interact with each other? These and other crucial issues on the social significance of imagery and built structures in Neopalatial Crete were the subject of a workshop which took place on November 16th, 2009 at the University of Heidelberg. The papers presented in the workshop are collected in the p...

More than 100 years ago Sir Arthur Evans' spade made the first cut into the earth above the now well-known Palace at Knossos. His research at the Kephala hill as well as contemporary fieldwork at further sites on Crete saw the birth of a new discipline: Minoan Archaeology. Since these beginnings in the first decades of the 20th century, the investigation of Bronze Age Crete has experienced fundamental progress. The impressive wealth of new data relating to the sites and material culture of...

Engaging Transculturality is an extensive and comprehensive survey of the rapidly developing field of transcultural studies. In this volume, the reflections of a large and interdisciplinary array of scholars have been brought together to provide an extensive source of regional and trans-regional competencies, and a systematic and critical discussion of the field’s central methodological concepts and terms.Based on a wide range of case studies, the book is divided into twen...