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† Cutler (J.E.) Crafting Minoanisation. Textiles, Crafts Production and Social Dynamics in the Bronze Age Southern Aegean. (Ancient Textiles 33.) Pp. xxvi + 284, figs, b/w & colour ills, b/w & colour maps. Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2021. Cased, £48. ISBN: 978-1-78570-966-1.
This publication is an in-depth examination of the process of ‘Minoanisation’ – the adoption of Bronze Age Cretan culture in the southern Aegean islands and on the Greek mainland – using textile technology as a case study. It foregrounds an agent-centred approach in order to understand the potential reasons for Minoanisation, which highlights the participation of women and sheds light on the previously understudied phenomenon of female mobility within the Middle and Late Bronze Age Aegean. The book primarily focuses on the evidence for Minoan weaving technology within Crete and the southern Aegean, particularly the presence of terracotta loomweights, which are the surviving material remains of the wooden, and thus archaeologically-fugitive, warp-weighted loom. While several types of loomweights were used on Crete, C. suggests the presence of Cretan discoid loomweights at southern Aegean locations indicates the spread of both Cretan-style loom technology and the complicated Minoan textile techniques that this equipment made possible. Cycladic iconographic evidence proves that Minoan-style textiles were familiar to southern Aegean communities, and the presence of loomweights indicates local production, provides information about similarities or differences to Cretan regional textile manufacture and suggests mobile cohorts of probably female teachers and students who adopted and adapted Cretan weaving techniques.
The study begins by explaining the evidence for Minoanisation in the southern Aegean, which increased gradually throughout the Middle Bronze Age and is characterised not only by Minoan-style textile equipment, but also by pottery, frescoes, architectural and domestic styles, the use of Minoan weights and measures, cooking and table habits, mortuary and cult practices as well as bureaucratic and administrative mechanisms such as Linear A tablets and Minoan seals and sealings. Traditional explanations for Minoanisation in the southern Aegean include a Minoan ‘thalassocracy’, where political control from Crete involved Knossian rule of an empire that covered a...