![Gournia Minoan Palace 1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Gournia_Minoan_Palace_1.jpg)
Gournia ( el, Γουρνιά) is the site of a
Minoan
The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age Aegean civilization on the island of Crete and other Aegean Islands, whose earliest beginnings were from 3500BC, with the complex urban civilization beginning around 2000BC, and then declining from 1450B ...
palace complex on the island of
Crete
Crete ( el, Κρήτη, translit=, Modern: , Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the 88th largest island in the world and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, and ...
,
Greece
Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders with ...
, excavated in the early 20th century by the American archaeologist,
Harriet Boyd-Hawes
Harriet Ann Boyd Hawes (October 11, 1871 – March 31, 1945) was a pioneering American archaeologist, nurse, relief worker, and professor. She is best known as the discoverer and first director of Gournia, one of the first archaeological excavat ...
. The original name for the site is unknown. The modern name comes from the abundant hollow vessels found all over the site.
Gournia lies in the municipality of
Ierapetra
Ierapetra ( el, Ιεράπετρα, lit=sacred stone; ancient name: ) is a Greece, Greek town and municipality located on the southeast coast of Crete.
History
The town of Ierapetra (in the local dialect: Γεράπετρο ''Gerapetro'') is loc ...
in the prefecture of
Lasithi.
Chronology
The overarching term "
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second pri ...
" means something different depending on the culture and region of the world being studied. The Aegean Bronze Age is defined according to the place, which are mainland, Aegean islands, and Crete. These are referred to as Helladic, Cycladic, and Minoan respectively. Although Crete is an island in the Aegean, their culture is so distinctive from the ones considered to be Cycladic that it stands on its own.
Archaeologists abbreviate the chronological periods using two prefixes. The first one always refers to the major Bronze Age period which are Early, Middle and Late. The second letter stands for the place: H for Helladic, M for Minoan and C for Cycladic. Lastly, some of these periods are further divided and distinguished from each other by adding Roman numerals and sometimes letters for subperiods.
Thus, EM IIB refers to the last half of the second period of the Early Minoan Bronze Age. Besides using this notation, since the Bronze Age in Crete is based on the building, use, and destruction of important architectural structures known as "palaces" found throughout the island, Minoan archaeologists tend to employ and use these as criteria to name the periods as Pre-palatial, Protopalatial, Neopalatial and Post-palatial.
History
Harriet Boyd Hawes excavated the Minoan village for three field seasons in 1901, 1903 and 1904. Boyd and her team were able to expose almost the entire town, uncovering sixty houses, a central building which she called "the palace", the cemetery and a road system connecting all these features.
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Gournia and other Minoan sites were settled along the north coast where seasonal storms, particularly in the winter, bring the salt inland making the land unsuitable for crops. Nonetheless, the location of the settlement is strategic due to being at the island’s narrowest point, connecting not only the east to the west but the north with the south. This makes Gournia the main trading center of the island in Minoan times.
There is evidence that the Minoans traded with the Egyptians as evident by the Cretan artifacts found in Egyptian sites and the opposite is also true. Moreover, the influence of this relationship can be seen in art, where the Minoans borrowed techniques and imagery from Egyptian art.
Cemetery at Sphoungaras and North Cemetery
![M ller 60freigestellt](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/M_ller_60freigestellt.jpg)
Sphoungaras is located 150 to 200 meters from the Gournia ridge, looking over the coast. Its natural rock shelters, openings in the rock, provided the Minoans for a suitable space to bury their dead without the need for physical labor to create or built tombs. The cemetery was in continuous used from EM II to the end of LM I.
Inhumation
Burial, also known as interment or inhumation, is a method of final disposition whereby a dead body is placed into the ground, sometimes with objects. This is usually accomplished by excavating a pit or trench, placing the deceased and objec ...
was the preferred mode of body disposal from early Bronze Age until the
pithos
Pithos (, grc-gre, πίθος, plural: ' ) is the Greek name of a large storage container. The term in English is applied to such containers used among the civilizations that bordered the Mediterranean Sea in the Neolithic, the Bronze Age and ...
burial, where the bodies were placed inside a large storage container, was introduced and became the norm around 1900-1800 BC. These burials were first excavated by Harriet Boyd and later revisited by Richard Seager in 1910
and Soles and Davaras in 1970.
Some of the artifacts found were various types of complete vases, jewelry, and
seals
Seals may refer to:
* Pinniped, a diverse group of semi-aquatic marine mammals, many of which are commonly called seals, particularly:
** Earless seal, or "true seal"
** Fur seal
* Seal (emblem), a device to impress an emblem, used as a means of a ...
made out of ivory.
The North cemetery is located along a steep and rocky ridge about 80 meters from Gournia.
First discovered by Boyd and her team in 1901, she discovered what she described as “intramural burials,” later coining the term “house tombs” to refer to them. Unlike the cemetery in Sphoungaras, people were buried in built structures here. The remains were deposited in no particular order on a
charnel house manner.
Tomb I
The house tomb is a square building measuring approximately 4 meters in all its sides. It is located on the east slope of the North cemetery. First excavated by Boyd, in 1971 it was revisited by a different team of archaeologists, yielding numerous artifacts presumed to be funerary offerings. Among the findings were two small vases, a miniature jug, a mug with no handles from MM Ia found in situ; as well as a silver kantharos, two bird's nest bowls, a pair of bronze tweezers, stone vases, seals, jewelry and fragmentary sarcophagi with remains of 8 skulls and other unidentified bones.
Tomb II
Together with Tomb I, the second house tomb are the best preserved funerary structures in Gournia. Unlike Tomb I, this house tomb is rectangular and consists of two rooms; it is the only tomb that has an altar. Altars are commonly found outside of
tholoi
A beehive tomb, also known as a tholos tomb (plural tholoi; from Greek θολωτός τάφος, θολωτοί τάφοι, "domed tombs"), is a burial structure characterized by its false dome created by corbelling, the superposition of suc ...
, round structures where the dead were commonly deposited, in other sites from the South of Crete. Nonetheless, both Tomb I and II would have appeared like normal houses to outsiders without the presence of the shrine due to the use of the same construction techniques and architectural style applied to build the town's structures.
Some of the artifacts found in this house tomb were stone seals, fruitstands, three bronze tweezers, terracotta vases, cups, jugs, pithoi, and larnakes. Among these were fragmentary bones with only one salvageable skull. The accumulation and pattern of deposition of the human remains suggest that these were moved to the side once fully skeletonized to make space for more bodies.
This was a common practice among the ancient Greeks and is still practiced today in many other cultures.
See also
*
List of ancient Greek cities
A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to:
People
* List (surname)
Organizations
* List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America
* SC Germania List, German rugby union ...
References
Bibliography
* Watrous, L.V. (2012). “The Harbor Complex at Gournia,” ''American Journal of Archaeology'' Vol. 116 (2012), pp. 521–542.
* Watrous, L.V., D.M. Buell, J.C. McEnroe, J.G. Younger, L.A. Turner, B.S. Kunkel, K. Glowacki, S. Gallimore, A. Smith, P.A. Pantou, A. Chapin, and E. Margaritis. 2015. "Excavations at Gournia, 2010-2012," ''Hesperia'' Vol. 84 (2015), pp. 397–465.
* Watrous, L.V. D. Haggis, K. Nowicki, N. Vogeikoff-Brogan, and M. Schultz. (2012). ''An Archaeological Survey of the Gournia Landscape: A Regional History of the Mirabello Bay, Crete, in Antiquity'' (Prehistory Monographs 37). Philadelphia, PA: INSTAP Academic Press. .
* Watrous, L.V., and A. Heimroth. (2011). “Household Industries of Late Minoan IB Gournia and the Socioeconomic Status of the Town,” in ''ΣΤΕΓΑ: The Archaeology of Houses and Households in Ancient Crete'' (Hesperia Suppl. 44), edited by K. Glowacki and N. Vogeikoff-Brogan, pp. 199–212. Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens. .
External links
Gournia Excavation Project*
ttp://www.travel-to-crete.com/place.php?place_id=36 Gournia Crete
{{Authority control
Minoan sites in Crete
Ierapetra
Aegean palaces of the Bronze Age
Populated places in ancient Crete