As I slowly grow older I search for great movies that really talk about the Crete I know and love. They are rare but here is one that is very good indeed. It is about Crete in all seasons including specific journeys in autumn and winter when the beauty og the island is extraordinary. Here is the film:
I hope that you enjoy it, it is well over an hour long, but do watch it all. There is a great deal of wisdom and knowledge here.
Ray
At last I have found a pretty recent, hour long video professionally produced of just the beautiful Amari Valley that I have often mentioned. It is still one of the best places in Crete to see although the main roads seem to avoid it. It is the biggest area to the south of Rethymnon and has lots of beauty and history.
I have written much about the Minoans and Arthur Evans firm belief were that the tablets he discovered that came to be known as Linear B where in his opinion definitely not Greek or even Ancient Greek. This in fact was wrong and Michael Ventris proved that they were, in fact, Greek. Because of this discovery we are much more able to progress beyond Evans. In fact I am pleased to announce that the BBC wrote an article upom Ventris and then went on to create a film of his whole story.
Here is the film of the story. It is a you-tube film in seven or so parts. Here is the first part, see the rest on you-tube.
It is brilliant.
Ray
Here is your chance to see the movies:
Enjoy . . .
By Evangelos Vallianatos
Just before Easter 1900, Greek sponge-fishers were on their way to the waters of Tunisia when a violent storm threw their boats to Antikythera, a tiny island located just north of Crete in the Aegean.
After the storm, the sponge-fishers explored the waters of Antikythera for sponges. One of the divers, Elias Stadiatis, discovered the remnants of an ancient ship full of statues – horses, men, women, and vases.
Of several treasures, the most precious was a very small piece of metal with gears, which the archaeologists of the National Museum in Athens originally dubbed astrolabe, which in Greek means, “star catcher”. Astrolabes helped figure out the position of the sun and the stars in the sky.
Astrolabes were not complicated devices. However, the machine of Antikythera was complex and, eventually, Greek archaeologists renamed it the Antikythera Mechanism dated from 150 to 100 BC.
The shipwreck probably happened in the middle of the first century BC. The doomed Roman ship was sailing from Rhodes to Rome. It carried looted Greek treasure: more than 100 bronze and marble statues, amphorae, and coins.
One statue, the Antikythera Youth, is a bronze masterpiece of a naked young man from the fourth century BC.
Museum officials left the fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism alone until one of them, the archaeologist Spyridon Stais, saw an inscription in ancient Greek on one of the dials. Others noticed perfectly cut triangular gear teeth. It was May 1902.
In 1905, Konstantinos Rados, a naval historian, said the Antikythera device was too complex to be an astrolabe.
In 1907, the German philologist Albert Rehm sided with Rados. Rehm correctly suggested the Antikythera clockwork resembled the Sphere of Archimedes that Cicero saw and described in the first century BC.
Archimedes, a mathematical genius and engineer of the third century BC, was the greatest scientist who ever lived. He is the father of mathematical physics and mechanics that made the Antikythera computer possible.
Cicero said the planetarium of Archimedes reproduced the movements of the sun and the moon, including those of the planets one could follow with naked eye: Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. The moon, Cicero said, “was always as many revolutions behind the sun on the bronze contrivance as would agree with the number of days it was behind it in the sky. Thus the same eclipse of the sun happened on the globe as would actually happen [in the sky].”
The next important phase in the decipherment of the Antikythera Mechanism starts with Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist and historian of science teaching at Yale University. In 1974, he left us a scientific record of his assessment. This was Gears from the Greeks, a masterful account of how he decoded the Greek computer.
Price took 16 years studying the intricacies of the Greek device. He reported that the Antikythera Mechanism was “one of the most important pieces of evidence for the understanding of ancient Greek science and technology”.
He explained why: The complex gearing of the Antikythera Mechanism shows a more precise picture of the level of Greco-Roman “mechanical proficiency” than that coming out of the surviving textual evidence: this “singular artifact,” he said of the Antikythera Mechanism, “the oldest existing relic of scientific technology, and the only complicated mechanical device we have from antiquity quite changes our ideas about the Greeks and makes visible a more continuous historical evolution of one of the most important main lines that lead to our civilization”.
Yes, science from the Greeks is a straightforward highway to us. It materialises in technology like the one found in the lump of metal with gears. And that device, housed in a wooden case the size of a shoebox or dictionary, after a tortuous path, became Western technological culture.
Price described the differential gear of the Antikythera Mechanism as the landmark of the computer’s high tech nature. This was the gear that enabled the Antikythera Mechanism to show the movements of the sun and the moon in “perfect consistency” with the phases of the moon. “It must surely rank,” Price said of the differential gear, “as one of the greatest basic mechanical inventions of all time”.
In fact, after the Antikythera Mechanism-like devices almost vanished in late antiquity, the differential gear did its own disappearance for more than a millennium and a half. It reappeared in 1575 in a clock made by Eberhart Baldewin in Kassel, Germany.
It was this gear from the Greeks, and the clockwork culture that moved it along, that advanced the technology of cotton manufacture in the 18th century. Eventually, the differential gear ended up in cars in late 19th century.
Price complained that the West judges the Greeks from scraps of building stones, statues, coins, ceramics, and a few selected written sources. Yet, when it comes to the heart of their lives and culture, how they did their work in agriculture, how they built the perfect Parthenon, what kind of mechanical devices they had for doing things in peace and war, how they used metals, and, in general, what the Greeks did in several fields of technology, we have practically nothing from the Greek past.
“Wheels from carriages and carts survive from deep antiquity,” he said, “but there is absolutely nothing but the Antikythera fragments that looks anything like a fine gear wheel or small piece of mechanism. Indeed the evidence for scientific instruments and fine mechanical objects is so scant that it is often thought that the Greeks had none.”
Price died in 1983.
In 2005, a British mathematician and filmmaker, Tony Freeth, put together a group of international scientists to get to the bottom of the ancient Greek computer.
Freeth convinced two companies to volunteer their high tech imaging technologies for the Antikythera Mechanism: X-Tek from England and Hewlett-Packard from the US.
The scientists and engineers who decoded the Antikythera computer concluded that it was the most sophisticated technology in the Mediterranean for more than a millennium. They published their reports in the November 30, 2006 and July 31, 2008 issues of Nature. (These articles and other relevant data can be found on the site of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project.) According to the 2006 report, the Antikythera Mechanism “stands as a witness to the extraordinary technological potential of ancient Greece, apparently lost within the Roman Empire”.
The story, however, is more complicated. It was the Christianised Roman Empire that devoured Greece. In all likelihood, the fires of the mint and the blazes of the smelters ate Antikythera Mechanism-like devices, which in the Christian society of Rome lost all utility and meaning.
The celestial Antikythera device provided the names of the Panhellenic games like the Olympics.
The scientists who studied it were right that this “artifact of ancient gearwork” was more than a device of pure astronomy: “exhibiting longitudes of heavenly bodies on the front dial, eclipse predictions on the lower back display, and a calendrical cycle believed to be strictly in the use of astronomers on the upper back display.”
The first inscription on the back of the Antikythera Mechanism reads: “the spiral [ΕΛΙΚΙ] divided into 235 sections.” This meant that one of the back dials was a spiral representing the 19-year Metonic moon and sun calendar of 235 months. Other back dials predicted the eclipses of the sun and the moon. The front dials, on the other hand, were about the months of the year, the zodiac run clockwise around them. The inscriptions on these dials explained which constellations rose and set at any specific time.
Moreover, the front dials showed the movement and position of the sun, moon and the planets in the zodiac. They also revealed the date and phase of the moon.
The ideas of Hipparchos, the greatest Greek astronomer, found expression in the Antikythera computer.
From about 140 to 120 BC he had his laboratory in Rhodes. More than other Greek astronomers, he made use of the data of Babylonian astronomers. But like the rest of the Greek astronomers, he employed geometry in the study and understanding of astronomical phenomena. He invented plane trigonometry and made astronomy the predictive mathematical science it is today. In addition, he discovered the “precession of the equinoxes”.
This meant he proved the fixed stars are not really fixed stars but very slow movers that appear to be stationary. He left a list with all his astronomical observations, including the observations he borrowed from the Babylonian and Greek astronomers.
The connection of Hipparchos to the Antikythera Mechanism is in the front bronze plate of the device where pointers displayed the positions and speed of the sun and the moon in the Zodiac.
Hipparchos knew the moon moved around the earth at different speeds. When the moon is close to the earth, it moves faster than when it is farther from the earth when it slows down. This is because the moon’s orbit is elliptical, not the perfect circular movement the Greeks associated with the stars. Hipparchos resolved this difficulty with his epicyclic lunar theory, which superimposed one circular motion of the moon onto another, the second movement having a different centre.
The Antikythera Mechanism modeled the ideas of Hipparchos with one gearwheel sitting on top of another, but located on a different axis. A pin-and-slot mechanism then takes under consideration the non-circular or elliptical orbit of the moon. A pin originating from the bottom wheel enters the slot of the wheel above it. When the bottom wheel turns, it also drives around the top gearwheel. However, the wheels have different centers and, therefore, the pin slides back and forth in the slot, which enables the speed of the top wheel to vary while that of the bottom wheel remains constant.
Geminos was another astronomer who influenced the development of the Antikythera Mechanism. Geminos flourished in Rhodes in the first century BC. His book, Introduction to the Phenomena, includes ideas that resemble the inscriptions in the Antikythera Mechanism on the names of the months; which years had 13 months, which month would be repeated in those years, and which months had 30 and which had 29 days.
The scientists who studied the Antikythera Mechanism, reading its inscriptions, saw the hand of Geminos in the Antikythera device.
Geminos worked from a legacy of astronomical and scientific thought that mirrored the Greeks’ knowledge of the heavens.
The Greeks also developed mathematical astronomy from their observations of the sky. This and the clear insight of trigonometry in its applications to the problems of the heavens established the data for measuring the phenomena of the stars. Hipparchos in Rhodes and other scientists in different centres of scientific studies set up the infrastructure for building and using Antikythera Mechanism-like machines.
The Korinthos/Syracuse case for this development has the advantage of evidence etched right on the back of the Antikythera Mechanism. The names of the months inscribed in the computer are names of months one finds in the calendar of Korinthos and its colonies, including Syracuse, home of Archimedes. Seven of those names are identical to the names of the months in the calendar of Tauromenion in Sicily founded by Greeks from Syracuse in the fourth century BC.
All the cycles in heavens, especially those of the sun and the moon, were captured in the Antikythera Mechanism. The Greeks used their mathematics, especially geometry, to simulate astronomical phenomena, creating an accurate universe with gears.
Could it be that Hipparchos who explained why the moon changes speed while zooming around the earth, created the first astronomical computer, something like the Antikythera Mechanism? It’s quite possible he did, but Archimedes is a more reliable candidate because he built a planetarium and, more than that, he, like Aristoteles, was crucial in the making of the Greek golden age of science. He measured curved surfaces and applied mathematics for the study and understanding of nature. He deciphered the book of the cosmos and became the model for Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. If Archimedes did not build the prototype astronomical computer, its designer was clearly indebted to him.
The Greek physicist Antonis Pinotsis studied the coins of Rhodes and he noticed an interesting evolution in the ray-crowned head of the god Sun/Helios on the Rhodian coins that harmonised with the advances in the astronomical knowledge in the island. That is a great insight. However, even if that observation is accurate, and in all likelihood it is, science and advanced technology in the Alexandrian era became Panhellenic, spreading fast from polis to polis, possibly from Syracuse to Rhodes or from Rhodes to Korinthos.
Thus, the Antikythera computer predicted lunar and solar eclipses and tracked down the movement of the moon and the sun and the other planets. In addition, it was a calendar for the most important agricultural and religious events in the Greek world. That calendar, for example, helped the Greeks to offer the same sacrifices to the gods at the same times of the year.
The scientists who studied the computer concluded that it was “a microcosm illustrating the temporal harmonisation of human and divine order”.
The roots of the Antikythera Mechanism are deep in Greek culture.
Platon, one of the fountainheads of Greek thought, loved more than theory. He admired the mathematical nature of craftsmanship. Indeed, he was a mathematician. Without counting, measuring and weighing, Platon said, arts and crafts would be pretty much worthless. Men would have to resort to conjecture and guesses in dealing with each other and in doing things.
Aristoteles, who shaped the nature of science, also admired craftsmen and inventors for their useful devices and wisdom. In fact, of all the social classes in a polis, he considered the class of mechanics the most essential. No polis could exist without the mechanics practicing their arts and crafts. Of those arts and crafts, Aristoteles said, some are “absolutely necessary” while others contribute to luxury or enrich life.
Philon of Byzantium, writing in late third century BC about mechanics, is emphatic that advancements in technology rely on theory and trial and error.
As late as the fourth century of our era, the Greek mathematician Pappos of Alexandria praised mechanics as “a science and an art”, useful “for many important practical undertakings” as much as being prized by philosophers and mathematicians.
Crafts and mechanics among the Greeks, including the technology of the Antikythera Mechanism, were scientific and fundamental to their culture and life.
Francois Charette, professor of the history of natural sciences at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, studied the Antikythera computer and concluded that “mind-boggling technological sophistication” must have been available to those who made it.
Evangelos Vallianatos is a Greek writer living in the US and writing on Greek history and ecopolitical issues. He is the author of “This Land is Their Land” and “The Passion of the Greeks”.
A stunning medieval castle and a tale of ghosts . . .
Frangokastello looks very much today as it did when it was built in 1371. In this area of south western Crete live a race of people called the Sphakiots. They are strong and brave and fear no man. They can be a severe problem to people who come to conquer them, as did the Venetians. So the castle was built here by the sea on a small plain under the White Mountains of Sphakia. Then . . . well, nothing happened. The Venetian soldiers stayed in and around the castle and the Sphakiots stayed clear of them.
But let us get on to the ghosts that still appear here, it is said. They are called the Drosoulites, the men of the dew, in English. The legend tells us that they appear on just one day a year at early dawn. A day in late May when it is damp and windless, they walk in single file through the castle and down into the sea. I have spoken to people who say that they have seen them, but they have never been photographed.
Some say that they are the hallowed ghosts of the men of Hadzi Michalis Dalianis who stood here in the castle with his 600 men in 1878 against the Turks. Eight thousand turkish soldiers were sent to deal with them.
Others say that the ghosts are simply a mirage of Libyan soldiers from across the Mediterannean, but nobody really knows. However Frangokastello keeps on being one of the most perfect 600 year old castles you will ever find.
Here is a video by Yannis Sakellarakis, an archaeologist, of a new Minoan site in Crete.
I hope that you enjoy it.
By Owen Jarus
A team of archaeologists have discovered a fortification system at the Minoan town of Gournia, a discovery which rebukes the popular myth that the Minoans were a peaceful society with no need for defensive structures.
The team’s efforts were led by Professor Vance Watrous and Matt Buell of the University at Buffalo. Located on the north coast, Gournia was in use during the neo-palatial period (ca. 1700-1450 BC), when Minoan civilization was at its height. The town sits atop a low ridge with four promontories on its coastline. Two of these promontories end in high vertical cliffs that give the town a defensive advantage, and it is here that the fortification system was discovered.
The team weren’t able to excavate the area, and so relied on photography, drawing and surveying to identify the fortifications. The eastern-most promontory had a heavy wall that was about 27 meters long. Beside it the team found a semi-circular platform of stone, almost nine meters in diameter, which they believe is the remains of a tower or bastion. The other fortified promontory had a two meter thick wall, running east-west, “as if to close off access from the sea,” said Buell.
The other two promontories slope gently down to the shore, and would have provided easy access to the town. “It was on these two promontories”, said Professor Watrous, “that the Minoans built structures.”
The town consists of around 60 tightly-packed houses, a ship shed, and a small palace in the centre, and archaeologists have discovered evidence of wine making, bronze-working and stone-working at the site. “Gournia gives you, the visitor, a real feeling of what an Aegean town was actually like. Walking up the streets, past the houses, you feel like you’ve been transported into the past,” said Buell.
In addition to the beach fortifications, it also appears that the Minoans built a second line of defence further inland. Heading back from the beach, there were two walls, together running about 180 meters east to west. Backed by a tower, or bastion, the walls would have posed a formidable challenge to any invader trying to march into the town.
Defenders manning this system of fortification would have rained projectiles down on attackers, by using bows and slings. The walls had stone foundations and were made of mud brick, making them sturdy enough to stand on.
It’s an open question as to whether the people guarding the fortifications were part of a militia or something more organized. There was “definitely a body of men who would have had that duty but we don’t know exactly what they were like,” said Professor Watrous.
Tombs uncovered by Hawes and other excavators have shown people buried with swords. Watrous said that there was one particular tomb that produced an entire collection of daggers, swords and other items.
However, Gournia’s fortifications did not prevent the town’s demise. The town fell around 1450 BC, along with other Minoan settlements. A new group called the Mycenaean appeared on Crete at this time, taking over the island.
Watrous said that Mycenaeans probably avoided attacking the town by sea. “Many other settlements were destroyed at the same time. My guess is that they just came along the land; they didn’t have to come up from the sea”.
He cannot say for sure if the town defences were ever actually put to their intended use. Any evidence of a battle near these fortifications, such as weapons or bodies, would be underground, and excavation would have to be carried out to see if they exist.
One thing that excavators can say is that the people of Gournia had something worth fighting for. Many of the goods they made – such as the wine and the bronze implements – were for export, suggesting that the people had some level of wealth.
Ralph Stockbridge, who has died aged 92, was awarded two MCs for the notable part that he played in the Cretan Resistance to the German occupation; he spent the remainder of his career working for MI6.
When Crete fell to an airborne invasion in May 1941, Stockbridge, then a signals sergeant in the Field Security Corps, was evacuated to Egypt with the remnants of the Allied forces on the island. He promptly asked to return, and was put in touch with the Inter Services Liaison Department (a cover name at GHQ for MI6).
Stockbridge and Captain Jack Smith-Hughes, an SOE officer, were infiltrated into Crete in October 1941 aboard the submarine Thunderbolt. They later learned that this vessel was originally Thetis, which had sunk on its trials in Liverpool Bay in 1939 with the loss of many lives. The boat sank for the second and final time, with the loss of all hands, in 1943.
They were the first British mission to return to Crete, and were charged with developing its resistance movement. Stockbridge had never discovered what the duties of Field Security were, but he had become fluent in Cretan Greek while stationed there, and had made many contacts in the Heraklion area. This knowledge was now put to good use.
Despite being constantly on the run, he managed to keep transmitting valuable information to Cairo. Sometimes he operated from a cave high in the mountains. Drinking water was collected from stalactites. Meals in “safe houses” consisting of seed potatoes washed down with mugs of orange peel tea were recalled with nostalgia when their food later ran out and he and his comrades had to subsist on grass soup, wild herbs and snails.
When Stockbridge organised a parachute drop, little fell within the dropping zone. Sacks of flour could be seen bursting on distant rocks, while other supplies slid down steep precipices and could not be retrieved.
Clean-shaven, wearing shoes rather than boots, an overcoat and horn-rimmed spectacles, his appearance and stumbling gait matched his “cover” story: that he was a village schoolmaster. He used the name Michalaki, and later, Siphi.
Sometimes he had to go into towns and pass checkpoints manned by German security police. “They must have been blind not to see me trembling,” he said afterwards.
If the Cretans were caught helping the British, they could expect savage reprisals. Despite the hazards, as Stockbridge said afterwards: “Everything depended throughout on their magnificent loyalty. Without their help with guides, informants and suppliers of food, not a single one of us would have lasted 24 hours.”
On one occasion, he and a comrade were being pursued by a large patrol of Germans and Italians. Forced to hide their equipment and make a stand, they killed six of their pursuers.
On another, he was going through a checkpoint with Levtheri Kalitsounakis, who acted as his assistant. Stockbridge passed the inspection, but Kalitsounakis – who had reddish hair and green eyes – was suspected of not looking like a Cretan and was stopped and closely questioned.
Stockbridge was so distracted that he bumped into a German soldier. “Gosh! Sorry!” he said in English.
Then, realising what he had done, he had to fight the temptation to take to his heels, and instead stroll casually away.
In April 1942, three months after being commissioned, he found himself in even greater danger, after being betrayed. Evacuated to Egypt in May and awarded an MC, he volunteered to go back again.
In early 1943 he and his wireless operator, John Stanley, were re-infiltrated aboard a Greek submarine. They rowed ashore in a rubber dinghy and landed on the north coast of the island. As they came in, they gave the password to some Cretans who arrived in a small boat. These men, who had been fishing illegally, feared that they had been discovered by the Germans; they panicked and disappeared.
On going ashore, Stockbridge and his companion found themselves in a minefield. They extricated themselves and moved further down the coast, where their first contact was Paddy Leigh Fermor. While Stockbridge, the senior MI6 officer on the island, based himself at Rethymno and gathered intelligence in the central and eastern parts of the island, Leigh Fermor concentrated on his work for SOE.
After the German surrender, Stockbridge’s service of three years in Crete, two and a half of them during enemy occupation, was recognised by a Bar to his MC. He was also made an honorary citizen of Rethymno.
Ralph Hedley Stockbridge was born at Bournemouth on April 18 1917 and educated at the Perse School, Cambridge. It had been decided that he should have a classical education, a decision with which he complied without enthusiasm.
He set a precedent by resigning from the Officers Training Corps because he disliked the excessively militaristic member of the staff who ran it and he considered the wearing of puttees a tiresome relic of the Boer War. On the sports field, he captained the 1st XV and the athletics team and, in the one year he boxed, he won the Under Nine Stone title.
In 1935 he broke his leg playing rugby. The enforced absence from school and the encouragement of the senior classics master resulted in Ralph taking the Cambridge examination on crutches and winning a scholarship to Peterhouse. He spent the next three years in pleasant indolence and took an upper second.
After the war he joined MI6 – where he was known as Mike – on a permanent basis. As vice-consul in the Salonika consulate-general from 1946 to 1950 he reported on the intelligence aspects of the Greek civil war.
He was vice-consul in Alexandria from 1952 to 1954, and over the next few years spent time in Beirut, Tehran, Baghdad and Syria. He was at the British embassy in Athens from 1959 to 1966.
In 1961 Henry Leach (later Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Leach) paid an official visit to Heraklion. The British ambassador asked Stockbridge, then the First Secretary, to accompany him. At the reception on board, many of the guests were Stockbridge’s former wartime comrades.
Leach wrote in his memoirs: “They were marvellous people with walnut-like faces from constant exposure to the elements. Few wore collars or ties. Such was their personality that their complete inability to speak a word of English seemed not to detract at all from the conviviality of the occasion.
“They were drawn to Ralph Stockbridge as to a magnet and treated him as if he were a much loved God… It was one of the most remarkable and moving reunions I have ever been privileged to attend.”
Stockbridge returned to England in 1966 and served with MI6 in London until 1972. On his retirement he spent six happy years as bursar of St Faith’s preparatory school in Cambridge. Settled in a village in Cambridgeshire, he had more time to enjoy his books, his large stamp collection and corresponding with his many friends, most of them Greek or French.
Ralph Stockbridge died on March 10. He married first (dissolved), in 1948, Margaret Elizabeth Garrett. He married secondly, in 1963, Katharine Price. They survive him with a son and a daughter from his first marriage and two daughters from his second.
By Bruce Bower
Human ancestors that left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago to see the rest of the world were no landlubbers. Stone hand axes unearthed on the Mediterranean island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species — perhaps Homo erectus — had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between, says archaeologist Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island.
Several hundred double-edged cutting implements discovered at nine sites in southwestern Crete date to at least 130,000 years ago and probably much earlier, Strasser reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Archaeology. Many of these finds closely resemble hand axes fashioned in Africa about 800,000 years ago by H. erectus, he says. H. erectus had spread from Africa to parts of Asia and Europe by at least that time.
Until now, the oldest known human settlements on Crete dated to around 9,000 years ago. Traditional theories hold that early farming groups in southern Europe and the Middle East first navigated vessels to Crete and other Mediterranean islands at that time.
“We’re just going to have to accept that, as soon as hominids left Africa, they were long-distance seafarers and rapidly spread all over the place,” Strasser says. The traditional view has been that hominids (specifically, H. erectus) left Africa via land routes that ran from the Middle East to Europe and Asia. Other researchers have controversially suggested that H. erectus navigated rafts across short stretches of sea in Indonesia around 800,000 years ago and that Neandertals crossed the Strait of Gibraltar perhaps 60,000 years ago.
Questions remain about whether African hominids used Crete as a stepping stone to reach Europe or, in a Stone Age Gilligan’s Island scenario, accidentally ended up on Crete from time to time when close-to-shore rafts were blown out to sea, remarks archaeologist Robert Tykot of the University of South Florida in Tampa. Only in the past decade have researchers established that people reached Crete before 6,000 years ago, Tykot says.
Strasser’s team cannot yet say precisely when or for what reason hominids traveled to Crete. Large sets of hand axes found on the island suggest a fairly substantial population size, downplaying the possibility of a Gilligan Island’s scenario, in Strasser’s view.
In excavations conducted near Crete’s southwestern coast during 2008 and 2009, Strasser’s team unearthed hand axes at caves and rock shelters. Most of these sites were situated in an area called Preveli Gorge, where a river has gouged through many layers of rocky sediment.
At Preveli Gorge, Stone Age artifacts were excavated from four terraces along a rocky outcrop that overlooks the Mediterranean Sea. Tectonic activity has pushed older sediment above younger sediment on Crete, so 130,000-year-old artifacts emerged from the uppermost terrace. Other terraces received age estimates of 110,000 years, 80,000 years and 45,000 years.
These minimum age estimates relied on comparisons of artifact-bearing sediment to sediment from sea cores with known ages. Geologists are now assessing whether absolute dating techniques can be applied to Crete’s Stone Age sites, Strasser says.
Intriguingly, he notes, hand axes found on Crete were made from local quartz but display a style typical of ancient African artifacts.
“Hominids adapted to whatever material was available on the island for tool making,” Strasser proposes. “There could be tools made from different types of stone in other parts of Crete.”
Strasser has conducted excavations on Crete for the past 20 years. He had been searching for relatively small implements that would have been made from chunks of chert no more than 11,000 years ago. But a current team member, archaeologist Curtis Runnels of Boston University, pointed out that Stone Age folk would likely have favored quartz for their larger implements. “Once we started looking for quartz tools, everything changed,” Strasser says.
Crete 