Minoans (Peoples of the Past)

Rating:
Summary: Just the facts
Review: It's a book for serious students more than the general public. A typical sentence is "Construction of the tholos tomb C at Phourni was dated by the excavators to EM III, but a recent study has shown that the earliest burial layer in the tomb is of EM IIA date underlying an EM III-MM 1A level."
Fitton is determined to avoid unwarranted crackpot speculation, and she succeeds all too well. She sticks to the facts so effectively that she leaves out a lot of the interesting stuff. For example there's not a word about the Phaistos disk, in fact very little about epigraphy, and only one sentence about the possible language of Linear A.In describing the Akrotiri frescoes she goes into detail about the chemical nature of the pigments but avoids any wild guesses about the intriguing question of what the characters depicted are doing.
I enjoyed the last chapter best, where she finally lets her hair down and relates the archeology to some of the Greek myths and historical legends about King Minos and Ariadne.
It might be of interest if you're visiting Crete (or live in Crete) and are able to spend several days at the sites she describes in detail, and "The Blue Guide to Crete" isn't quite enough for you. It has little of the excitement of "The Decipherment of Linear B".

Rating:
Summary: Just the facts
Review: It's a book for serious students more than the general public. A typical sentence is "Construction of the tholos tomb C at Phourni was dated by the excavators to EM III, but a recent study has shown that the earliest burial layer in the tomb is of EM IIA date underlying an EM III-MM 1A level."
Fitton is determined to avoid unwarranted crackpot speculation, and she succeeds all too well. She sticks to the facts so effectively that she leaves out a lot of the interesting stuff. For example there's not a word about the Phaistos disk, in fact very little about epigraphy, and only one sentence about the possible language of Linear A.In describing the Akrotiri frescoes she goes into detail about the chemical nature of the pigments but avoids any wild guesses about the intriguing question of what the characters depicted are doing.
I enjoyed the last chapter best, where she finally lets her hair down and relates the archeology to some of the Greek myths and historical legends about King Minos and Ariadne.
It might be of interest if you're visiting Crete (or live in Crete) and are able to spend several days at the sites she describes in detail, and "The Blue Guide to Crete" isn't quite enough for you. It has little of the excitement of "The Decipherment of Linear B".