Architecture and Urbanism at Palaikastro: A New Neighborhood in Perspective

The Palace and Landscape Project at Palaikastro excavations, conducted under the auspices of the British School at Athens from 2013 to 2015, uncovered remains of three buildings in a heretofore unexplored area of the site. These buildings, two of which were completely revealed, show significant differences in construction, plan, and situation in what is essentially a different neighborhood of the Bronze Age town. With preserved floor deposits from Late Minoan IB and Late Minoan IIIB and contexts going back to Middle Minoan II, these newly revealed structures advance our understanding of the layout of the site and have implications for social organisation and chronological developments at Palaikastro and elsewhere on Crete. At the settlement level, we discuss the integration of this new sector in the overall layout of the town. At the neighbourhood scale, this paper focuses on a description of the three buildings, both in terms of architectural techniques and spatial organization, while drawing comparisons with other buildings from the Roussolakkos area. Finally, we address the functional development of the sector which witnessed important changes when, in Postpalatial times, the domestic na-ture of the buildings seemed to have dwindled in favor of a clear burst of ritual activities, attested both by various deposits (e.g., cultic material, feasting refuse) and architectural alterations of the preexisting built environment.