Minoan pottery is more than a useful tool for dating the mute
Minoan civilization. Its restless sequence of rapidly-maturing artistic styles reveal something of Minoan patrons' pleasure in novelty while they assist archaeologists assign relative dates to the
strata of their sites. Pots that contained oils and ointments, exported from
18th century BC Crete, have been found at sites through the
Aegean islands and mainland
Greece, on
Cyprus, along the coastal
Syria and in
Egypt, showing the wide trading contacts of the Minoans. The extremely fine palace pottery called Kamares ware, and the Late Minoan all-over patterned "Marine style" are the high points of the Minoan
pottery tradition.
The traditional chronology for dating Minoan civilization was developed by Sir Arthur Evans in the early years of the 20th century AD. His terminology and the one proposed by N. Platon are still generally in use and appear in this article.
Evans classified fine pottery by the changes in its forms and styles of decoration. Platon concentrated on the episodic history of the Palace of Knossos. Currently a new method is in its infancy, fabric analysis, which features geologic analysis of coarse and mainly undecorated sherds as though they were rocks. The resulting classifications are based on composition of the sherds.
A brief introduction to the topic of Early Minoan pottery is stated below. It concentrates on some better-known styles but should not be regarded as comprehensive. A variety of forms are known. In general the period is characterized by a large number of local wares with frequent Cycladic parallels or imports, suggesting a population of checkerboard ethnicity deriving from various locations in the eastern Aegean or even wider. The evidence is certainly open to interpretation and none is decisive.
