endlessrarities | From Houses to Towns...

I talked about Minoan houses a few nights back, so I'll turn my attention now to a place where their ruins survive in abundance.

It's the Minoan town of Gournia. Sadly, my information on the site is minimal. I couldn't track down an English guidebook...

Gournia has only been partially excavated. The excavations themselves are worthy of note - they were undertaken by Harriet Boyd Hawes, an American archaeologist who appears to have been a protege of Sir Arthur Evans, who dug Knossos. The excavations took place in the early 1900s, and by all accounts were ahead of their time.

If you want to read more about Harriet Boyd's achievements, then please follow the link: http://www.athenapub.com/11boyd.htm

She's a great role-model for women in general, and women archaeologists in particular. She co-authored a book on Minoan Crete with her husband, the anthropologist Charles H. Hawes - I must try and track it down and read it!

Another closer view of the houses in Gournia. Not much to look at now, but if they all looked like the little model I featured the other day and were nicely painted, then it must have been rather impressive:-

And, just to cast a dark shadow over the Minoan landscape, here's a view of some Mycenean masonry, overlying the Minoan ruins:-

You can tell it apart by its nicely worked blocks of masonry and by the fact that the structures are laid out on a slightly different alignment. It's evidence enough that when the Minoan Empire crumbled, others were waiting in the wings to move in and take their place...