Event: WEDS TALKS: From City to Village: Urban Dissolution at Late Bronze Age (1450-1100 BCE) Knossos

ABSTRACT: This talk will investigate processes of urban dissolution, a phenomenon herein defined as the loss of the urban scale. In contrast to the robust body of archaeological literature on urban formation and urban maintenance, comparatively few analyses have targeted urban decline, particularly in an Aegean context, where the disappearance of urbanism has been presumed the byproduct of the collapse of the state. Positioned in opposition to these narratives, the talk examines the urban dissolution of Late Bronze Age Knossos. From the mid-18th to mid-15th centuries BCE, Knossos was the largest city in the Aegean, twice the size of the region’s other settlements. About 350 years later, it had lost three quarters of its urban fabric and dwindled to the size of a village. The talk analyzes how and why the loss of urbanism occurred, through study of material evidence recovered by over a century of archaeological exploration in the Knossos valley.

BIO: Alice Crowe is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Cincinnati and a B.A. from Boston University. Her research focuses on the archaeology of the Late Bronze Age Aegean, and centers especially on the site of Knossos, where she explores issues of memory, urbanism and its loss, and ceramic production and consumption. For this research, she has received support from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the Archaeological Institute of America, and the University of Cincinnati University Research Council. Beyond ongoing projects at Knossos, she is publishing Late Bronze Age ceramic assemblages collected from the sites of Galatas and Tell Atchana, and by a regional survey of the Brauron area (ARTEMIS).