Word: minoan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hottest arguments and the highest enthusiasms in archaeology today swirl round the small Aegean island of Santorini. There Professor Spyridon don Marinatos, director of the Greek Department of Antiquities, is digging up evidence to explain the downfall of the great Minoan civilization in the middle of the second millennium B.C. Former TIME Art Editor Alexander Eliot, who has also written extensively on Greek history and mythology, recently visited Santorini to tour the excavations. His report...
...shown, the island was inhabited by an exceedingly sophisticated race of men. To make their buildings somewhat elastic and therefore earthquake resistant, they set wooden pins in the corner joints of the stones. They cultivated the olive. They produced pottery similar to the products found in Knossos, the Minoan city on Crete 75 miles to the south. But by far the most amazing creations of the ancient islanders were their frescoes...
...that had been Santorini-probably causing water to recede temporarily from shores around the Mediterranean. As the immense volume of water that had converged on Santorini rushed outward again in a giant wave, it smashed harbors and flooded large districts around the Mediterranean basin. The great sea empire of Minoan Crete simply vanished in the wake of Santorini's destruction...
Such is the scenario proposed by Professor Marinatos, the autocratic old genius of Greek archaeology, who has spent the past four summers excavating the rich Minoan town that he discovered on Santorini. The site of his dig is shrouded in rosy dust, shaded by tin-roof sheds, and shielded by high fences. Situated on the southern horn of the main island in a spot sheltered from the sometimes blistering north wind, the site straddles a deep, dry gully. Marinates began his dig by tunneling through the pumice from the gully bed. "We hit the bull's-eye right away...
...case for archaeological fingerprinting, Aström and a friend, Sven Eriksson, chief of the Swedish police's fingerprint department, collected some 200 impressions from ancient pottery found in Greece and Cyprus. The Mycenaean fingerprints had a distribution of 20% arches, 65% loops, 15% whorls, while those from Minoan Crete, a civilization some 1,000 years older, show a contrasting distribution of 4%, 42%, 54%. Their sampling was admittedly too small to suggest any major answer to perennial disputes. "My purpose," Aström explained, "is to maintain that fingerprints can be used in defining a population...