Late Minoan representational soft stone seals : chronology, contexts, craft, and cognition
(2023)
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- Abstract
- This study covers all Late Minoan (16th-13th c. BCE) soft stone seals with representational imagery, which constitutes one of the largest ensembles of seals known from the Aegean Bronze Age. Through their iconographic and technical features, these seals have the potential to greatly contribute towards better understanding the social groups of the period. Iconographic and stylistic patterns seem to reflect the use of the seals by different social groups – a fact testified in previous studies of other seal types. Despite the importance of the corpus of Late Minoan representational soft stone seals for unraveling the political, cultural, and social dynamics of Late Minoan Crete, a comprehensive, systematic analysis of this ensemble has been lacking. This dissertation addresses this gap in Bronze Age scholarship by categorizing the evidence based on typological, chronological, and geographical criteria, enabling the identification of distinct seal groups and the exploration of synchronic and diachronic distribution patterns. These groups and patterns offer valuable insights into the social structure of the period. The data thus collected is analyzed through the prism of theoretical models in order to explore the social structures of Late Bronze Age Crete as reflected by one of the most ubiquitous products of Minoan material culture.
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Citations
Wolf, D. (2023). Late Minoan representational soft stone seals : chronology, contexts, craft, and cognition. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/27057