Robert Cromarty

The impetus for this paper arose from observation that, in many respects, the archaeology of Bronze Age Crete – that is ‘Minoan’ archaeology – still lagged behind the majority of European archaeology in its discussions of societal-level practices of identity construction and maintenance. The practice of fragmentation, and the subsequent disposal of the fragmented object, is one of the fundamental processes of societal organisation in early states and, where it occurs, it serves to unite ideologically often-disparate groups of people and to communicate a shared cosmology.

For much of the history of archaeology, the concern has been on the retrieval and reconstruction of whole objects or artefacts and then using these ‘complete’ objects to inform us of the culture which made or utilised them. However, such an approach has three fundamental drawbacks: firstly, that it immediately consigns a very significant (if not predominant) portion of the archaeological record to a secondary or redundant position. Secondly, it entails that the reconstructions of these artefacts is done according to the notion of the excavator rather than the archaeological author i.e. the original creator. Thus the object takes on a chimeric quality which lessens its authority and information on the past (this problem is very well exemplified from the Minoan culture with the reconstructions of the frescoes at the Palace of Knossos, especially that of the ‘Priest King’.). Thirdly, it transposes modern Western notions of completeness, worth, significance, and value to entirely separate and distinct cultural systems, whose understanding of these concepts may be utterly different, if they conceived of them at all.

Whilst there has been some little work done on the process of artefact fragmentation on Bronze Age Crete (primarily Rehak, P., 1994, ‘The Ritual Destruction of Minoan Art’, Archaeological News 9: 1-6; ‘The Use and Destruction of Minoan Stone Bull’s Head Rhyta’, in Aegaeum 12: 435-460) this has been predominantly associated with a single specific category of artefact – the Bull’s Head Rhyta. However, my own recent work on this subject indicates that the deliberate fragmentation of objects may be greatly extended within the scope of the ‘Minoan’ sphere.

Building on the work of Chapman (Chapman, J., 2000, Fragmentation in Archaeology: People, Places and Objects in the Prehistory of South-Eastern Europe, Routledge: London and New York) this paper identifies several individual artefacts from Bronze Age Crete, all of which have been repeatedly qualified as objects of ‘key’ or ‘extreme’ cultural value, which were found in a fragmentary state, typically in a closed and archaeologically distinct deposit. It is significant that these objects are not generally acknowledged as being fragmentary, even though it appears that they were deliberately deposited in this condition. Following these individual examples the notion of deliberate fragmentation is extended to a further category of artefact, the ‘stone offering table’, which have been widely reported to have been found in fragmentary conditions in numerous excavations. By doing so the paper aims to suggest that the process of fragmentation may well have been a primary process in the ‘ritual’ practices of Minoan Crete.