Dr. Barbara Montecchi - Projekte

Counting, labelling and sealing at Ayia Triada: A systematic and comparative study of the largest corpus of Neopalatial sealed documents

 

The focus of this research project are the sealed documents found at the beginning of the 20th century in the Minoan site of Ayia Triada (in South-central Crete). From this site comes the largest documentary archive of the Neopalatial Period – dating to LM IB, i.e. around the middle of the 15th century B.C., according to traditional “Low Chronology”, or the middle of the 16th century B.C., according to “High Chronology”. We have, in fact, 147 written clay tablets and more than one thousand small clay lumps of different shapes bearing one or more seal impressions. Texts are written in Linear A, that is a script used for noting a still unknown non-Greek language. Although these documents have aroused great interest since their discovery, they have not yet been studied and discussed together in an organic and systematic way. Therefore, this project aims to fill this gap in an attempt to: 1) reconstruct administrative strategies at one of the most important Minoan centres, 2) to arrive at the people behind the documents (e.g. to understand who were the seal owners, who were the people involved in economic transactions, etc.), 3) elucidate the complex links between different administrative systems and regional spheres of power in Neopalatial Crete.

This study is founded on three different kinds of sources: 1) original field-notes, 2) first-hand examination of the material, 3) silicone and plaster casts of seals and sealings kept in the CMS (Corpus der Minoischen und Mykenischen Siegel) archive of the Heidelberg University Insitute for Classical Archaeology.

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Letzte Änderung: 12.04.2020
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