La collina di Haghios Ioannis a Gortina. L’occupazione della Messarà centrale tra la fine del Neolitico e la nascita della polis: nuove prospettive di ricerca

This paper presents a joint project of two former students of the Italian School of Archaeology at Athens who decided toreconsider the much debated issue of the origin of the polis of Gortyn in south-central Crete by reconstructing the settlementhistory of the region from its first settling in the late fourth millennium BC to the early seventh century BC. The project,initiated in 2005 and still ongoing, develops some ideas that arose during conversations in Athens in the course of theseminars of urban-planning and topography that were introduced to the school programme by E. Greco, and are stillongoing. Although some preliminary results have already been achieved, the main aim of the paper is to present the potentialof a research project that was conducted from two different perspectives - Minoan and classical - following a bottom upapproach.