Socioeconomic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: The Lba‐eia East Mediterranean via a Case Study of Lasithi, Crete

Abstract

SummaryThe collapse of states c.1200 BC in the east Mediterranean is one of the best‐known socioeconomic crises of the ancient world. The period also witnessed notable innovation in a range of cultural spheres. The more general historical relationship between crisis and innovation can be productively explored using the increasingly detailed data available on this period and region, including case studies like the present one. This focuses on the north Lasithi area of east Crete in connection to recent archaeological work there, particularly at the site of Karphi and on its finds. It is contextualized in terms of the wider Mediterranean crisis context and the particular cultural responses seen in the Aegean. The paper explores the cultural contexts and outcomes of state collapse in ways which can help to interrogate received general models of historical innovation drivers. Does crisis in fact tend to produce technological regression and simplification, as elites disappear and complex sociopolitical systems break down? Do crisis‐spurred population movements have a direct role in transforming technology? Alternatively (or at the same time) does crisis provide a freed‐up social and economic space in which latent local innovation can emerge? In the multi‐context approach to interpreting cultural change adopted here, spheres of technological innovation which have already been intensively studied for the relevant period (e.g. iron introduction) are assessed from new angles, and less‐discussed/‐researched innovations (e.g. in textile making) are explored at a detailed scale through the case study, allowing evaluation of potential cross‐stimulus between different innovation spheres in the context of crisis.

Mobility and Metals: Insights on Manufacturing, Consumption, Knowledge and Procurement Networks at the Bronze–iron Transition From the Karphi Assemblage

“…Recent archaeological data mirror those from contemporary sites at lower altitude, showing a broad-based economy and selective adaptation of LBA practices linked to the lowlands and coasts (olive production, cattle herding, shellfish consumption; see, e.g., Flint-Hamilton 2017; Snyder and Klippel 1999; Snyder and Reese 2017). Some distribution networks, including those for clays and finished pottery, seem to have been reorientated during and after the relocation period (Wallace 2018b; 2021; Nodarou 2020). The broader context of collapse of state-like regional centres (as for example Knossos and Chania seem to have been in the thirteenth century BC) and mass settlement relocation suggests that highly polarised or centralised procurement systems were absent, though the few continuing, contracted coastal sites probably concentrated some trade, and large inland communities like Karphi were clearly not economically self-sufficient units: for example, the community sourced pumice for tool-sharpening uses from the north coast (Wallace 2020, 177).…”