Late Minoan IB marine ware, the marine environment of the Aegean, and the Bronze Age eruption of the Thera volcano

Abstract

Late Minoan IB fine ware pottery includes a number of decorative styles. The most spectacular of these is characterized by motifs, hitherto only rarely deployed by Cretan vase painters, drawn from the marine world. Late Minoan IB marine ware turns up in ritual contexts, which include human sacrifice. The pottery style is likely to reflect, then, not simply a vagary of secular fashion, but a circumstance or circumstances requiring far-reaching religious attention. It is proposed that Late Minoan IB marine ware and the cult activities in which it was deployed were a response to negative effects of the Late Bronze Age Thera eruption on the marine environment of the Aegean.

Second Intermediate Period date for the Thera (Santorini) eruption and historical implications

“…This needs more investigation with analysis and dating of initial to earlier LMIB contexts. The subsequent appearance and wide but selective distribution of the notable Marine Style motifs of the Special Palatial Tradition in later LMIB, and the associations of these with ritual contexts, is conspicuous [95,207,208], and may offer one reflection of, and even ideological statement referencing, the long-reaching events (seismic, volcanic, and tsunamogenic), trauma, and changes in the southern Aegean that resulted directly and indirectly from the enormous Thera eruption [3,17,45,49,56,60,199,208]. 1 but re-run instead with a more compressed/shorter LnN(ln(0.75),ln(3)) constraint on the Difference query for the time interval between stages (ii)/(iii) and stage (v).…”

Wild Nature? Human-Animal Relations on Neopalatial Crete

“…One cannot ignore the depictions of marine animals on Marine Style pottery at the end of this period, or on slightly earlier stone vessels, pointing to an interest in the sea in an elite context which is difficult to explain in terms of fishing; cultic associations have been proposed (Mountjoy 1985). As argued above, however, this does not explain why marine animals should have such associations; the disruption to the marine environment caused by the eruption of Thera has been used to explain the subject matter of Marine Style pottery (Müller 1997, 322;Bicknell 2000), but a variety of marine imagery, including the seal shown in Figure 5d, predates this. Morris (1995, 193) suggests that marine depictions potentially had a number of meanings, but acted as 'iconographic reinforcement' of the function of vessels as containers of liquid.…”