Crete enters the Wider Aegean World? Reassessing Connectivity and Cultural Interaction in the Southern Aegean between the Late Neolithic and the Beginning of the EBA (5th and 4th Millennium BCE)

In a landmark article published in 1996, L. Vagnetti argued that Crete in the Final Neolithic period (4500-3000 BC) ended a seclusion lasting 2 millennia, and entered the wider Aegean world in the context of “a new trend of establishing long-distant communications, urged by the introduction of new technologies, such as metallurgy”. The basis for this statement was provided by the pottery found at Nerokourou, in west Crete, which linked more strongly with sites located in other Aegean islands, than with sites located in Crete itself. Subsequent research into the Final Neolithic of Crete confirmed its importance as a period of major socio-economic reconfiguration, but opened up a debate regarding the trigger that initiated these changes, because some scholars interpret them as the result of the arrival of new groups from overseas late in FN, and others as the outcome of an increase in long-distance connectivity originated from Crete. The results of recent geological and archaeological researches conducted at Phaistos, an elevated site located in south-central Crete, allows to reconsiders some of these issues because have showed that the site, until the very end of the IV millennium BC, was on the coast and after sporadic frequentations occurred during the V millennium BC, was settled by people who shared the same material culture as the extremely mobile groups that between the end of the VI and the end of the IV millennium BC, colonised most of the Aegean island. The site, therefore, on the one hand provides a great opportunity to ascertain whether and to what extent substantial changes in material culture could have been triggered by human mobility; on the other, it allows to address the questions of where, and why people moved, providing also important insights for interpreting the uneven nature of the relationship between Crete and the southern Aegean between the 5th and 3rd millennia BC