Socializing Architecture:(Monumental) Architecture and Social Interaction in Minoan Society. With a Main Focus on the Minoan Palaces in the Neopalatial Period(1700-1450 BC)

Abstract

Every society designs specific types of built spaces suitable for structuring a complex web of social relationships and interactions. Permanently interacting, space and society have a strong reciprocal relationship. Scholars in a number of related scientific fields such as anthropology, sociology, and behavioral sciences, have come to recognize the importance of the built environment to the social lives of people. Because of their highly compartmentalized nature, buildings have the power to structure movement, encounters, and social interaction between different users. Architecture sets the stage for certain activities to happen at the expense of others. In the process of place-making, the investment in a useful design and elaboration of the built environment throughout the stages of the Pre-, Proto-, and Neopalatial periods on Crete were major tools that aided the emerging and finally well established Minoan elites in making sense of their world. This dissertation adopts an integrative approach to the Minoan built space to investigate the ways in which the Minoan elites employed (monumental) architecture and performance as a means of advancing their socio-political power during the Pre-, Proto-, and Neopalatial periods. In order to do so it synthesizes most of the ongoing discussions in past and recent publications on Minoan architecture and society in an all-compassing diachronic perspective - from the Prepalatial Tholos and House tombs to the Proto-and Neopalatial Minoan Palaces - and highlights ‘how’ and ‘why’ these monumental building structures played profound roles as active media in the structuring of Minoan communities.