PEAK · A view from the Minoan mountains: investigating the role of marginalised communities in the establishment of a long-lasting Aegean Bronze Age ritual tradition

PEAK investigates, for the first time, the pivotal yet long-overlooked role that Middle and Late Bronze Age Cretan (c. 1900-1450 BCE, aka ‘Minoan’ culture) mountain communities played in the management of large collective rituals held at mountain-top sanctuaries (‘peak sanctuaries’) and the subsequent influence the latter bore on ritual practices held in lowland centres (‘palaces’). Challenging traditional theories promulgating the passivity of upland populations to prevalent palatial control, the project traces the political agency of mountain populations through an innovative, interdisciplinary, and bottom-up analysis of ceramic figurine use at peak sanctuaries. Within this scope, PEAK aims to trace where the ritual participants came from, what they sought to communicate during the events, and how they bonded while negotiating matters of trade, defense and land division through participation in collective performances. Gained through an innovative combination of approaches from humanities (archaeology, anthropology), science (petrography, pXRF), and digital humanities (GIS, SfM) – for which premium training is undertaken at UNIVE and the BSA – answers to these questions bestow political agency to mountain communities and indicate the existence of a reciprocal power relationship the peaks and palaces maintained during the 2nd millennium BCE. Alongside revolutionising scholarly understandings of the structure of Cretan Bronze Age society, PEAK significantly enhances the candidate’s research capacities and professional profile through the acquisition of new widely-applicable research and horizontal skills.