Bramiana: Salvaging Information from a Destroyed Minoan Settlement in Southeast Crete

This volume presents the salvage excavation of a Minoan settlement at Bramiana in southeastern Crete that was destroyed during the creation of a new system of agriculture in the 1980s. Excavation of the site provides new evidence for a Bronze Age economy based on trade, agriculture, and craftwork. This publication is a test case for a highly successful new system of organizing all the pottery based on its petrography, sorting it by materials and workshop practices. The results show the existence of an unsuspected large trade network operating across hundreds of kilometers for the routine distribution of cooking pots and other clay vessels and their contents. The Minoan settlement used the lustrous and silky smooth fine ceramics invented presumably in the still undiscovered palace near modern Ierapetra; this technology would be used for the fine Mycenaean tableware of the Late Bronze Age.