Natural Influence and Human Reflections: Modeling Cretan Maritime Culture in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Abstract

Despite Crete’s long-standing reputation as a powerful, even imperial thalassocracy during the Minoan Bronze Age (3000–1150 B.C.E.), recent scholarship has called into question not only the assumed links in a tenuous chain based on legend and a single quote by Thucydides (Thuc. 1.4), but also the existence of Cretan thalassocracy (e.g., Stewart 1997) and even the very suitability of Cretan geography for larger-scale “imperial” maritime engagement (Harrison 2018:41). Further complicating comprehensive understanding of Cretan maritime engagement are the variability of the Cretan landscape, comprising a geography shifting across millennia in a seismically active region, as well as significant regional and international social, economic, and political change. While Cretans unquestionably engaged with the sea, the exact nature and scope of this engagement and how it shaped maritime culture remain uncertain. This thesis is intended to help remedy this deficit. Grounded in an understanding of maritime culture as an occupation-based folk-group phenomenon as outlined by Toelken (1996), and approaching the subject from the perspective of maritime cultural landscapes theory as propounded by Westerdahl (1978), my study uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to model the influence of various natural (i.e., geographic) and human (i.e., archaeological) factors which to varying degrees contributed to the growth and/or continuance of maritime culture in Crete. To this end ArcGIS Pro ModelBuilder was used to produce geoprocessing tools to conduct a thorough landscape analysis incorporating firsthand field survey and research datasets, to evaluate the relative potential of a broad set of environmental and anthropogenic factors. Conceived as a foundation for future work, such tools were designed to be flexible enough to allow further refinements and the testing of alternative theories in the study of maritime culture landscapes, which conceivably might be applied to any coastal region. Using theoretical frameworks based on exemplars and practical limitations, this project conducted a comparative study of the regions of Khania and Mirabello, respectively located along the northwestern and northeastern coasts of Crete. Models revealed both potential relative suitability of specific features and patterns of relative influence, with final indices indicating the overall theoretical impact upon maritime (sub)cultures. Results suggest that during the approximate millennium following the Early Byzantine Tectonic Paroxysm (EBTP), from the later part of the First Byzantine Period (330–823 C.E.) through the Venetian Period (1210–1646 C.E.), roughly comprising Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the maritime cultural landscape of Khania was significantly more conducive to productive activities such as fishing and trading, whereas Mirabello was more vulnerable to predatory acts of raiding or piracy.