In doing some reading on the Minoan palaces, I have become interested in an idea that a few recent scholars have put forth as an alternative to a strict hierarchical model of political control in Proto- and Neopalatial Crete: that of a factional heterarchy. I feel that this model reflects certain aspects of the archaeological record much better than the hierarchy model does. However, at least in the sources that I have found, arguments against the hierarchy model have been limited mainly to the fact that Crete lacks a clear “iconography of power”, royal burials, and other distinct evidence of a relatively permanent, centralized authority figure or figures, and defenses of the heterarchy model limit themselves to delineating how a factional heterachy would have been possible in the context of palatial Crete, rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive analysis of the failings of the hierarchy model to account for various aspects of the archaeological record and the ways in which the heterarchy model is able to accommodate those aspects. I would like to take up this issue in a paper. Using Renfrew’s (1984) five lines of investigation in social archaeology (spatial organization, trade and information flow, material manifestations of authority, continuous growth, and discontinuous change) as a baseline for comparison of the two models, I would attempt to demonstrate how the factional heterarchy model provides a valid and perhaps superior way than the traditional model by which to interpret power relationships in palatial Crete.

Posted at Nov 02/2005 07:45AM:
chris witmore: Clearly you are on top of things Kristin. Let's talk specifics with regards to the empirics soon.