 Hello everyone and welcome to this week's ARF Groundbag talk. I would like to start by with our land acknowledgement. The Archeological Research Facility is located in Huchin, the ancestral and unceded territory of Chicheno-speaking Aulani people, successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. We acknowledge that this land remains of great importance to Aulani people and that the ARF community inherits a history of archaeological scholarship that has disturbed Aulani ancestors and erased living Aulani people from the present and future of this land. It is therefore our collective responsibility to critically transform our archaeological inheritance in support of Aulani sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of all American Indian and indigenous peoples. So thank you for coming today and I'd like to pass the mic over to Kim Shelton. Thanks, Sarah. Thank you for having me here today to introduce our speaker. Many of you already already know Jesse, but just to formally introduce him, Jesse Oberg is a PhD candidate in the ancient history of Mediterranean archaeology program here at UC Berkeley. Jesse has had a really a vast experience working in all different kinds of archaeology in different parts of the world, but most recently, of course, in Greece, he's had a long history with the site of Mauclos in Crete and it was there, I think, that he really got a lot of practice and experience working with ancient metals and I think has become a real, well, it's almost, it's better than a side hustle. It's really something that he truly enjoys doing in addition to field work and of course is also an ancient historian, so he really hits all of the marks in his methodologies, in the questions that he asks and of course in his teaching of which he also has had a vast amount of experience and I personally have benefited from his experience teaching and I'm very happy to say that. So Jesse's going to be talking to us today about his dissertation project and going into some questions that he, and things work, the recent work that he's done in the field and when he was recently in Greece in order to to work and move forward that project, which is the violence and state formation on Crete in the age of Hoplite warfare. So please help me welcome Jesse Obert, speak to us today on violence and Crete. Thank you very much, Kim. I'm going to share my screen and blow it up and okay, cool. So yeah, I just wanted to start by saying thanks to the ARF and to everyone else for their support. I was able to get funding from Berkeley and from some outside institutions that really helped me go to Greece. I was supposed to be there in 2020-21 but COVID, so I was there last fall and the museums were very accommodating and dealing with COVID and everything else. So thank you to everyone. I no longer have the ability to move forward. Okay, Crete is a very large island. It's one of the largest islands of the Mediterranean. It's on in the eastern Mediterranean and it's on one of the major seaways through sort of east west through the Mediterranean. It's also there's a major trade route between Greece and Libya on the western side of the island. You basically have to go by Crete if you're going to go from the Near East to Western Europe. So it was really a focal point for a lot of ideas and technology and trade and things like that between the various regions. Hoplites are in a complex term. It just means warrior. It used to have a much more specific meaning in that it was this type of enclosed faced helmet warrior with a with a horsehair crest and a bronze breastplate and a very large shield spear. That has been challenged more recently and we are now sort of thinking about hoplite says something similar to that but all encompassing all warriors of the Greek period of the Greek mainland and area. The age of hoplite warfare is a term that is a chronological period that starts with the introduction of this equipment and then sort of ends in the late 5th and beginning of the 4th century with the adaptations to it and the development of what will become Hellenistic warfare. Crete has the earliest evidence for this equipment. It has the earliest enclosed faced helmets and the earliest bronze well not the very earliest early bronze corset but a whole lot of really early bronze corsets and probably one of the earliest shields so it's always been thought of as a sort of the beginnings of the hoplite age of hoplite warfare. It also potentially has the earliest city-states Greek city-state culture developing before everywhere else in the Greek in the Greek world and so my dissertation is really trying to explore how these two phenomena are happening and how they're interacting with each other the development of hoplite warfare and the development of the Greek city-state culture. So these 10 blue stars are the 10 city-states polis that have evidence for violence organized violence in this period and the red stars are extra urban sanctuaries so these are kind of hard to reach sanctuaries that would have been sort of limited to elites in their accessibility and so there were spaces for elites to interact with each other outside of the sort of view of the rest of their communities and they could sort of shed their political identities in order to just talk to each other and communicate with each other as elites and they were sort of restrictive spaces not not explicitly but just due to the fact that it took a lot of time and money to get there for those festivals. Palais Castro is a bit of a wildcard still lots to debate about what how it's actually functioning it's potentially a third one of some sort of ancient Bronze Age site that has been treating being treated like an extra urban sanctuary but it is sort of an extra urban sanctuary. So if I were to ask this question violence of state formation on Crete 20 years ago I would have an ancient historian would have given me a single response you know just go look at Plato's Laws and in Plato's Laws there's three characters debating the sort of the nature of laws and how to make the best community in ancient Greece this is a fourth century text there's a Cretan, a Spartan and an Athenian and at the beginning of the debate the Cretan says I suppose stranger that our customs are also easy for everyone to understand or it is possible to see that the whole of the Cretan countryside is not a plane like that of the Thessalians whereas they would rather use horses we run since the land is uneven and more suitable for the practice of running by foot it is necessary to possess light arms and armor in such a land and to not run with the burden so the lightness of bows and arrows is considered to be a good fit therefore everything for us is oriented around war and it seems to me that our law giver arranged everything with this in mind. The consensus the scholarly consensus for most of the 19th 20th century was that this was a statement of a historical fact and that Plato had some good knowledge of Crete and maybe he visited Crete and chose Crete as the location for this debate because it was a sort of fitting backdrop of how a good state should be. That idea has been challenged recently and the structure of what Plato is doing is being sort of re-evaluated. Josiah Ober in his 2019 Seidel lectures came to Berkeley and talked about folk theory that Plato presents early on in his dialogues and then he sort of tears it apart he presents the stereotypes that everyone sort of assumes and then he tears it apart over the course of his dialogue and I think that is exactly what's going on here after the Cretan makes the statement the Athenian spends the rest of book one picking it apart and showing oh no you're wrong that's not actually how Crete is. The Cretans run up hill sides and use light bows and arrows because the community is trying to encourage the rich people to do things like get good at bows and arrows and do physical labor like run up a hillside that has nothing to do with warfare or anything else like that. So I think we were like reassessing what this means and we were opening up a new area for exploration if we sort of accept that there's some problems with Plato's summary of Crete. If you asked a military historian violence and state formation on Crete and you'd only get something like this the movie 300 actually had several prominent Greek military historians as advisors so this is the sort of orthodox style of hoplite warfare. Everyone was sort of standing facing the enemy with a shield protecting the guy to their left and you know really heavy equipment really heavily encumbered and they all worked together in unison as a troop and they were highly disciplined. This idea is existed in the 19th century and then sort of permeates through everything and is still very very a part of Greek scholarship or scholarship of warfare in a not recent anymore now almost 10 years old but in this book Men of Bronze they the editors sort of set out to end the debate once and for all and in their introduction they show how they wanted to see how the orthodoxy holds up in light of recent criticism and to challenge revisionists to present a coherent paradigm that would do nothing short of rewrite the history of the early Greek poets of the early Greek city-state. This approach this sort of assumption that the orthodoxy must be right is really totally unfounded. There's no real good evidence for it. The current narrative of the hoplite orthodoxy was promoted by Victor Davis Hansen in his 1989 the western way of war and he uses sort of speculation about how the helmets must have felt and how heavy the equipment must have been and then a whole lot of other outside comparative stuff to sort of make an argument that the hoplite warfare was this manly cooperative egalitarian thing that had huge ramifications for how Greek culture operated and he has a very clear agenda is you know if you look at his history his bibliography you see what he does with his work and I don't think a lot of scholars are taking that into full consideration when they start quoting his ideas. His most recent book called The Dying Citizen argues that allowing immigrants into America and giving them citizenship is diluting the American citizen body and that that's going to cause the collapse of the American experiment. You know these are very neo-conservative like right-wing ideas that are all grounded in his understanding of the hoplite orthodoxy that which again has no evidence for it. There has been some pushback over the years it just doesn't give very much attention. Hansen Macy's Greek warfare myths and realities have showed how there's no evidence for the hoplite orthodoxy in the classical literature. More recently Rocheneidike's classical Greek tactics has tried to reassess and present a new idea about how Greek warfare must have operated in the classical period and archaeologists like Anthony Snodgrass have been showing for years that there's just no good reason to think that there's some sort of system of cooperation happening on the battlefield. So these is push for new paradigms or this assumption that we need one single paradigm for the whole of Greek warfare I think is a totally misguided approach and I think instead what we need to be thinking about is small-scale regional practices when it comes to violence and the use of organized violence. And so something like Crete with its extra urban sanctuaries it's where these spaces where there's interaction happening between various elites from different communities is a sort of test case that we can build off of and sort of thinking about how Greek warfare or Crete warfare and everything else is operating around each other. So I think this is my dissertation is filling a gap. The goal is to study all of the evidence for organized violence on Crete through digital humanities and I have this point 880 entries pieces of evidence for violence so it's quite a large database comparatively and then I'm going to map it alongside the sort of political and economic and institutional changes that we already kind of know about for the archaic and classical periods. I have two parts to my to my dissertation the first part creates the database and sort of explains the justifications for putting all the artistic and epigraphic and archaeological evidence in a single space and how I compare them and everything else. And part two is a sort of temporary this is what we know now because I imagine as we do more archaeology on the island the picture will change and we'll learn more and more over time. So I have an idea for what is there now and I have several important observations but but I am very aware that this is going to change over time as we learn more. So those observations at this point I have three observations the first is that this often quoted line interesting conflict and interpolity warfare actually has no good evidence. It's I think it's probably true I think they probably were fighting each other a whole lot and there was a lot of war on Crete but there's just no evidence for it and the lack of evidence is notable and worth pointing out so something we need to be a lot more careful with when we're talking about warfare on Crete and warfare in general. The second observation is that the archer narrative that you know this line from Plato that we've been citing over and over again has really created a mirage in our evidence and I think archaeologists have been looking for archery and so they found it and if we start picking apart the evidence that we do have it becomes a little questionable whether their archery is really part of what we would call Cretan warfare or if it's just another type of violence that's really important on the island for the Cretans. And the third observation which is the sort of bulk of what I'm going to talk about today is that rather than real a real type of warfare that's unique to Crete I think I've discovered an elite masculine ideology and what I mean by that is I think violence organized violence is operating in a very interesting way within Cretan communities in which elites are using it as a way to express their eliteness and express their masculinity and keep their eliteness and masculinity or maintain sort of barriers between certain members of the community and themselves so that they can be elite and masculine and everyone else is not doesn't fit the bill. So it's part of this state formation state organization process I think rather than a real on-the-ground practice at least until the end of my period in which we can actually get better evidence. So this is what my database looks like this is just taken screenshot the left hand side is the sort of metadata I have the graphic information description chronological information material measurements contexts and then links for online resources if you want to go look at the piece in the museum or something like that or just see a good google image of it. The images and drawings for the ones that are relevant or that have that information and then I have the tags and the tags are really the bread and butter of what I'm doing this is the backbone of the approach excuse me. So each tag is a argument that someone has made about about violence or Greek warfare and the way that organized violence is practiced in the ancient world. So the first two working class hoplites versus leisure class hoplites these are this is Hansen Basz's argument for Athens and Sparta in the classical period he argues that the roughly half of the Athenian and Spartan armies were working class hoplites and the other half were leisure class meaning that half were guys who just sort of were conscripted and had to go show up and they bought the minimum and practiced the minimum amount of time you know effort put in the minimum amount of effort and bought the minimum amount of equipment in order to show up and do their duty and fight on the battle in the battle. Whereas the other half were leisure class hoplites guys who had enough money to sort of sit back and do whatever they wanted and actually put time and energy into trying to look good and trying to be good on the battlefield and just as a preview there's really no evidence for working class hoplites on Crete at all which is very interesting but so I the way that I do this is I take this Mitra for example and I say well is this evidence for Venways's working class hoplites yes or no is this evidence for leisure class hoplites yes or no and so this is a groin guard this would have hung from the bottom like from the belt over the groin it's very highly decorated it's very it's very beautiful piece and so it does satisfy Venways's leisure class hoplites argument and so I have a confidence coefficient associated with that how confident am I that this does satisfy his argument and it's out of three and this Mitra which is you know even in the accessory if it was undecorated it's even even more sort of unnecessary to the kit and beyond the minimal requirements by every measure so it certainly is to me a good piece of evidence for Venways's arguments over leisure class hoplites so then I can go through the list and I think most of these are self-explanatory cavalry silo which means like light infantry for in Greek attendance mercenaries mounted hoplites are guys who just ride to the battle and dismount to fight as hoplites this is a greenhauls argument epulactoids from canaia dikes reconstruction of greek warfare in the late fifth and early fourth centuries there's sort of like special forces that are given specific tasks on the battlefield archers and then the orthodox hoplite argument from Victor Davis Hansen and then I've also included mobility restrictions and audio restrictions so how obstructed are their hearing how obstructed is their vision visual restriction these are all parts of Victor Davis Hansen's argument and then things like repair and use two different shield types which are snod grasses shield types the large round shield versus the small omphalos type and then these the last three are single combat group combat or typology segregation so are they separating out typologies on the battlefield and I have no nothing to say about any of those because the evidence is just not very clear but I you know including them anyway so this is visualization of what my database looks like so this is using FE network analysis map and so every single dot is an entry in my database and they're all connected together due to the various tags that they hit but for now before I get into exactly how to read this I want to draw your attention to the types on the right I have about 20 percent of vote are about voted miniatures I have spearheads arrowheads you know the rest like you know arms and armor and plaques and inscriptions and coins and texts and painted pottery etc etc but what I think is really interesting and this is my first major observation is mostly what we're missing from this list we have we have no skeletal evidence for violence we have several we have lots of skeletons in this period but none of them have perimortem wounding which is worth emphasizing and noting and how strange that is we don't have any good evidence for use on all these on use in the sense of use that would indicate large scale warfare we don't have any evidence of that on any of the arms and armor we have evidence of damaging on a lot of pieces but it's always only just a like a single stab wound which is not diagnostic for large scale combat we have basically no fortifications or fortresses before 400 which is something that is always perplexed creten archaeologists crete in the periods before and after do have fortresses and fortifications and in other parts of the greek world they had fortresses and fortifications in these times so that's sort of a strange anomaly that they don't bother at all in this period we have tons we have hundreds and hundreds of inscriptions and they the ones that are in this database about 3.35 percent are mostly referencing war booty we don't have explicit mentions of militaries of warriors of military alliances military campaigns casualties of war or war captives and finally the texts themselves the Athenian sources mostly Athenian sources don't mention interstate warfare by any measure on crete before 400 pindar and paratus might be referencing civil conflicts civil wars and decidities might be describing a raid in 429 but i think that that is probably the first potential evidence for real interstate conflict and it's a weird one at that it's a raid so to say that we have interesting conflict and interpolity warfare i think needs to be challenged we need to sort of stop and wait and think well do we actually have any evidence for that as i said i think it was happening but we just don't have any evidence so we need to be a lot more careful with how we're throwing those terms around as as scholars this is how to read my network analysis this is an introduction to the network analysis as i said each dot is a entry in my database so i have these four dots here an arrowhead a spearhead the line hunched shield in the upper right and then a mitra and whenever two or more dots hit one of the tags so this arrowhead and the shield are both hitting archery they a line is drawn between them the arrowhead and the mitrae are do not have evidence for leisure class hoplites but the mitrae and the shield are both evidence for leisure class so they're tied together nothing is tied to working class hoplites so that tag is just not going to be used at all and then the spearhead which is doesn't hit any of my major tags is just going to float away because it's not tied to anything else so when i spin it around it'll look something like this and it's important to emphasize that sort of spatial relationship is not relevant to these sorts of graphs they just happen to make that form and you can turn it any which way and it doesn't change what you're looking at the relationship is between how they're tied together rather than where they are physically but clusters will form that are important and how those are how those are tied here it is again my network analysis map of my database i've gone ahead i do identify all the major clusters the top one and the one on the right the two shield types are self-explanatory they is just different shield types that changed over time the biggest bubble is this leisure class hoplites bubble which i which you can break down into how restricted they are in terms of their mobility and their ability to see and hear i have evidence for cavalry but it's sort of disconnected and really concentrated in its different types uh entry types and i have archery but it's mostly arrowheads it's just it's uh really dominated by arrowheads and i noticed that there's this sort of uh conduit through which leisure class hoplites and archery are connected which is mostly texts which are the green nodes and so i removed texts to see what would happen and you get this when you remove the texts because they're also the most uh they have the most tags of anything in my database due to the nature of what they are so i was it was also wanted to remove them just to see what would happen for that and that for that reason and when you remove them you have just these two nodes sort of holding leisure class hoplites to archery and this is a the lion hunt shield and a tripod stand both from ida uh in uh early seventh late eighth or seventh century um they're beautiful pieces of art and they're really great objects to look and study look at and study but what's interesting is that the archery in this in this instance uh is not against other people uh the lion hunt shields which i'll talk a little bit more later is it's sort of um uh archers are are saving other people by firing at these animals these lions that are attacking people and in the tripod stand the archer is associated with this sort of like sphinx-like character uh down here in the lower right so i wanted to investigate archery more specifically and what i found is that uh basically most of revenues is probably related to hunting rather than organized violence rather than what we might call warfare uh these bronze applications from katasime they're very clearly about hunting animals there's a lot of animals in the images the coins are typically the arrowheads are typically associated with animals that would have been hunted uh like this wild goat uh and the arrowheads are mostly of this type 1d uh in the lower left uh which snidegrass is type 1d which uh he doesn't uh it's it's impossible to know a hunting arrowhead versus an interpersonal arrowhead due to the fact that uh it's really the shaft of the arrow that determines its purpose uh but you really want as much cutting edge as possible for a hunting arrow uh and these ones have the most these type 1d's have the most cutting edge of any arrowhead in the archaic and classical periods so uh there is good reason i guess to think that this might be a hunting arrowhead uh but just because it's a hunting arrowhead doesn't mean it wasn't used in combat it just means that it would have been more expensive to produce uh so take it or leave it but uh i wanted to see what would happen if you removed uh so here's my basic in and i wanted to see what would happen if you removed uh this sort of uh 1d arrowheads which which could be for hunting and the bronze epicae and the coins that are very clearly about hunting and you get this uh everything re-oriented around leisure class hoplite uh the texts are now subsumed by leisure class hoplites and part of the bubble the lion hunt shield is now firmly in the middle uh and the tripod stand has completely re-oriented around the cluster and and ended up between the shield types uh you still have archery of course but it's very peripheral and peripheral i guess so this is my second observation that i think we've been looking for archery and we've been finding archery uh but we're not being careful enough to distinguish between hunting and archery um jocho brawers and his dissertation argues that the word toxitase means something else besides archer and the Athenian sources he argues that it means somebody who has enough free time to get really good at shooting a bow and arrow because he argues that shooting an animal going hunting with a bow and arrow was sort of aristocratic whereas a spear was more was more uh lower class or working class uh and so i think we need to sort of think about what that word might be meaning for all of our sources and what archer really means and sort of reassess uh this idea that the uh that archery was specifically shooting bows and arrows again i think they are shooting bows and arrows on Crete and we do have good evidence of that uh just as i think they are committing violence um but or in an organized way as warfare but we just don't have the really solid evidence to make that argument and there's something off with however how we're approaching it and we need to be a lot more careful with that um so this also leads to my third observation which is going to be the rest of my presentation uh in the last 20 minutes and uh uh so uh the leisure class well as you might have noticed this whole time is really the main cluster uh we're talking about when we're talking about Cretan warfare uh and so i think what we have here is an elite masculine ideology uh related to being a leisure class hoplite uh and being an elite and being uh um and trying to express your masculinity and we need to be thinking about Cretan warfare and the evidence for Cretan warfare in there in those terms and ideological terms uh so here is the evidence over time uh you'll notice this big dip in the late seventh century this is a common problem that everyone knows about for Cretan archaeology it's called the archaic gap uh basically the pottery chronologies are are off and uh everyone knows it's there and there's been a lot of work uh in the last 10 years 10 years or so to try and resolve this problem and we're working towards this solution but the evidence for organized violence has not been uh addressed in any meaningful way oh in my database i have what looks like three chronological phases uh the first phase ending in the mid to late seventh century the second phase going from the mid to late seventh to the late sixth and then the third phase going from the late sixth beyond till the end of my period uh so it looks like we have three distinct chronological phases and i should say the first break uh the late mid to late seventh century it's a really important moment for Crete uh at Azoria you have the bulldozing of a bunch of houses on the uh in the center of town and then they build these large civic and public buildings uh Adreros you have the publication uh the inscription and publication of the earliest laws and at Canosos you have the complete uh abandonment of several prominent cemeteries so there's like major changes going on in the late seventh century absolutely and I and I think it ties very well with the sort of ideological shift that's going on in the way that they're thinking about organized violence uh and then in the late sixth century you have the emergence of this war booty regulation genre of treaties uh we don't have very many of them but uh prominent scholars uh in the study of Greek epigraphy and Cretan epigraphy have argued that it's the beginning of a much sort of broader and larger genre that then continues into the Hellenistic period and I think that this represents a shift in the way that the community and the elites are thinking about violence as well but as I said this chronological uh narrative doesn't work because we know that the chronologies are off uh and a good example of that is what happened at Azoria uh most recently so Azoria is perhaps one of the best excavated and most recently excavated sites on Crete for the uh for this period for the archaic and classical periods uh and they found a bronze helmet in a uh like urban sanctuary in the middle of town you know it's all of my like all of my expectations it's exactly what we want it's super great and it's the wrong typology so it was found in early fifth century context but it's a late eighth uh early seventh century typology this like barely tall crusted open-faced helmet uh in other words it's a it's a phase one helmet in a phase three context so something is clearly wrong um I think a better way to think about this is is in the sort of like continuum sort of uh and based on context more than anything else in fact I hate forgot there was a there's an exercise that I forgot to show you but but I'll summarize it uh so uh the first phase which I'm calling the ideology of camaraderie is really concentrated in extra urban spaces uh and in spaces that are sort of restricted to elites and a lot of the mortuary contexts it can also so probably elite restricted because that's the argument uh and this probably starts in the late ninth or early eighth century so outside just before my period begins uh this this ideology uh and I'll get into exactly what I think is happening with it but it it seems to continue as far as we can tell uh till the end of my period uh but with the late seventh century transitions uh all of the mortuary contexts and extra urban extra urban sanctuary contexts disappear and we now have an overwhelming uh huge uptick in urban sanctuary uh or evidence from urban sanctuaries and in these contexts we have a very different ideology we what I'm calling the army of one mentality my phase two and so I think through the late in the seventh and sixth centuries there's actually like a dueling ideology happening just in different contexts and extra urban sanctuaries have this more cooperative style of of our approach to organized violence and urban spaces have this more individualistic approach the third phase begins uh following some major changes in the way that the city the city states are trying to deal with organized violence in particular the war booty regulations and so I think it's a again happening at the same time just like slightly different perspective and different uh space for this this sort of uh type of ideology in particular I should emphasize that whereas phase one and two are ways in which elites are expressing their eliteness and masculinity and talking about violence and thinking about violence and it may not actually be practical uh real warfare organized violence happening on the ground the third phase which is mostly Athenian sources looking at Crete uh it might be good evidence for actual violence happening on the ground but it's all violence that's happening outside of Crete so it still doesn't necessarily show that there's interesting warfare on the island it just shows that how Cretan warriors were actually fighting so whereas phases one and two are ideologies in the purest sense that we have no evidence they're actually being sort of practiced on the ground and they might look very different on the ground phase three is a is an on-the-ground ideology that's being practiced in in reality uh okay so now I'm going to go through each of the phases and describe them a little in more detail uh phase one which is concentrated in extra urban sanctuaries and in elite spaces uh has the omphalos shield type has an open-faced helmet it's very much dominated by leisure class hoplites we also have this big archery uh cluster uh and the evidence uh looks a lot like we have these sort of cooperative images you know hoplites and that's kind of hard to see but hoplites all running together towards a common common enemy uh marching up together uh guys standing shoulder to shoulder fighting shoulder to shoulder uh more cooperative styles of warfare like naval warfare and this is the only time we get any references to naval warfare despite Crete being an island and then we have these sort of more open-faced helmets these lighter shields these more fluid styles of combat and this is what I think a phase one warrior might have looked like with their all-crested helmets an open-faced helmet they use spears and swords but in general I can't really say much about weapons because the weapons are all earlier and they probably continue on without much change but the archaeology is really hard to pinpoint but the shields are all these beautiful decorated beautifully decorated tend to be lighter tend to be more one-handed style so more maneuverability and everything seems to be a lot more cooperative and organized they can see and hear each other very easily and I think the Lion Hunt shield is the best example of this best way to think about what this ideology is doing in this image all the all the sort of hand-to-hand warriors warriors with swords are in dire are being attacked by lions that are in a bad way and the archers are coming in to save the day and you can see how the enemies are are natural or maybe mythological in some cases but there's never sort of these images of actual people killing people and instead it's just like sort of we're all in this together idea sorry there's someone blowing in out on the street but anyway so there's a this this sort of like us versus them mentality this sort of like we're in this together I think this is really important to how Cretan elites are expressing this ideology of camaraderie in this one this two looks very differently and there's a leisure class hoplites bubble there's a large round shields bubble there's closed face helmets and cavalry there's archery and so this is there was a technical difficulty right before I brought this up but this is not this is a mid-sixth century plaque that probably does not belong here and so in fact I think archery is just going to float away and does not actually is not related to phase two it would still very much there but again it's probably just hunting arrows that are in urban spaces so here are some big graphs to show you what's happening I think in the late seventh century is this shift and things like cavalry things like mounted hoplites which is a very wealthy style of warfare and attendance are upticking in the late seventh century and although leisure class hoplites is going down here's the total and here's leisure class hoplites even though it's going down as a percentage it's actually getting a larger percentage of the total and so by the by the late seventh early sixth is when you really start to see leisure class hoplites dominate in this phase two and I think this is a sort of monopolization of violence by the elites I think that they're making violence organized violence is sort of elite only practice where you have to have a certain amount of wealth in order to be in order to buy in to the process and in order to be able to claim that you're a warrior and you have the whole kit and a certain amount of wealth in order to support that and here this the helmet shift as well in pretty dramatic ways and they start completely obstructing the hearing and peripheral vision and I'm calling this the army of one mentality because I think there's a lot of parallels to the sort of army of one's military slogan of the early 2000s in America the idea was to sort of sell people on individualism and say that you get to be this army of one super individual warrior when in fact everyone knew that joining the US military you had to sort of train to become a team member and work in as a team so there's this sort of false narrative being being promoted and I think the same thing is happening in Crete I think this type of warfare would have required a lot of attendance this in this plaque from Palais Castro you get to see this warrior who's stepping up onto the chariot so he's relying on a charioteer he's got a guy behind him with an open-faced helmet so he can sort of watch his back this style of warfare would have required required teamwork and a lot of collaboration but that's not how they're talking about it that's not how they're they're sort of displaying in art and everything else and it's always about the individual in the army of one mentality in this phase two thing masculinity is also changing in this time so you have this phase one warrior on the ribcage of this corset and his shield his own flow type shield is basically just replacing his torso and instead he's just ahead with some legs on a on a shield but now in phase two and you have this new emphasis on the male anatomy and you have the ribcage and these packs which are very common features of male figurines on Crete in this period and so it's a sort of emphasis and focus on what makes a man anatomically a man as well as these groin guards which are just all about anatomy in many ways and if you look at how phase one is dominated by shields the phase two is just completely dominated by Mitra these groin guards and there's just a complete shift in how they're and how they're using these objects and displaying these objects and that doesn't mean that you'll go away I think I don't need to everyone's here it's probably an archaeologist don't really need to go into this too much but but the omphalos type shields which is dominating phase one do leave behind evidence because they have bronze in them especially the omphalos itself we have tons of the the the little centers of the shield the navels but the large round shield is almost all wood so they don't really show up then we don't have actually any real examples of the large round shield on Crete not only in art but it doesn't go away it still it doesn't disappear there's they're still using shields in this period in phase two it's just that they're no longer detectable archaeologically here's the phase two warrior I really like this steely from previous because I'm pretty sure we're getting an x-ray vision this is supposed to be his shield and we're looking through it in order to look at his manly booty and his manly anatomical features that make him a man and his heavy chest armor and this like heavy equipment that he's that he's wearing he would have he's obviously worn wearing an enclosed base helmet that's obstructing his vision and hearing he's wearing a corset that would have been a little stiff he's wearing a groin guard and perhaps sometimes ankle guards of some sort and then this large round shield now instead of the small envelope type so when I was originally doing this I was sort of shocked that the phase two is so individualism in promoting individualism and individual ideas about about being a warrior as a sort of individual experience because it goes very much against initially I thought it went very much against the sort of current narrative about this period gunner zealand tag is argued that cretin elites were institutionalizing elite competition in this period and they were promoting egalitarianism amongst the elites in order to sort of create barriers between the elites and everyone else and to sort of make eliteness be an exclusive group so you don't compete with each other so that you maintain a little a level of social hierarchy and and status quo but now that I've been doing a little more thinking about it I think it actually if you think about masculinity and what it's doing masculinity in which you think about the monopolization of violence by the elites it actually works very well because because the claims of being an individual are within the sort of pre-established declaration that violence has to be committed by wealthy elites elites commit violence against other elites so the buy-in cost to be a warrior is so high and so exclusive already that then they can have these claims about being individual and these expressions of individuality because there's it's already within an enclosed space or within a an excluded space I mean it's still public but it's within a it's only going to be elites on elites and fighting against them amongst elites which is very interesting oh in the middle of the sixth century we have this new practice happening where they're inscribing their armor and the inscriptions all have a standard style they have the name tonde which is like this object and then helle which is a form of a rail meaning to like take or to bear and a lot of them have are so they also use apo in some sense so I think these are probably pieces of war booty that are being taken from the battlefield and brought back to the community and then displayed in the sort of hearth hearth temples these urban sanctuary spaces and we don't have them just on me try we have them on courselets and helmets as well and I think and most of them are dated usually to the sixth century and I think that this is sort of shifting it's a mechanism by which elites are expressing their leakness and their masculinity in this phase two period and I think this sort of kick starts what's happening in phase three so they're sort of they're sort of conflating the the process by which they claim a leakness with the actual ideology of the leakness which is very interesting we move into phase three and you'll notice there's a lot less evidence and a lot more texts the but the what I think is cool is that the main central little note there is epilectoid which so we're no longer orienting ourselves around leisure class hoplites but we're still orienting around ourselves around a rather specialty type of warfare so these war booty regulations that start happening in the late sixth century and then more in the fifth century they are evidence of communities city-states trying to institutionalize one aspect of organized violence and they never tell the warriors where to fight or how to raise an army or who gets to fight who doesn't get to fight they only regulate how that war booty is brought back into the community and rather interestingly in this the Tilesos Canosos Argos inscription in the fifth century all of the booty brought back is sort of organized and managed and regulated by the the city-state by the community so the warriors get nothing which is interesting they get the prestige and the you know the claim of everything of dedicating it but but all of it ends up going to probably a extra urban sanctuary and an urban sanctuary and the city determines how that is being distributed sorry and I think what's happening in this these late sixth century is this big shift tied to other major things happening on the islands like this spread of coinage and the adoption of coinage in the early fifth century that's when a lot of cretin or several cretin states start using coinage we have this sort of practice at Gorton where they shifting from thinking about fees and physical objects to thinking about them in terms of money in terms of coins and so I think this fits really well in this sort of commodification or monetization process that's happening on creep they're now thinking about war booty in terms of rather than sort of amorphous things that you're bringing back to within the community they're sort of putting price tags on it in a way and sort of thinking about how it's operating and commodifying it in a way and this triggers a new way of thinking about violence so there's still these dueling ideologies happening between the ideology of camaraderie and egalitarianism amongst elites and the sort of individualism elites only highly individualistic style of army one mentality phase two warfare but now in the phase three the emphasis is not on the practice of violence but is now on the accumulation of wealth through the violence so it's about what you do with your violence rather than how you are a violent individual I think these plaques there's three plaques from eastern Crete these I think these plaques really emphasize this point really well so this is a phase two warrior he's got his manly anatomical features and his heavy equipment but the I think the sort of focus of this image is not miss is on the warrior but it's it's on the slave or individual that he's dragging along it's about what he does with his military power now and how he converts that into sort of economic power for the community so I think this is a new way of thinking about how violence should be carried out on the island and how it's organized and how it operates within the community if we look at our texts this is the period where we actually have good evidence in our texts for Cretan warriors the way that they're described is a little bit all over the place so we get a lot of references to archers but as I said there might be some problems with that word and thinking about what that means we have them described as leisure class hoplites we have them described as siloes as light infantry as cavalry as epi lector and as mercenaries so I think like Cretans are sort of doing a little bit of everything they just were where they need to be when they're asked to be there and they're sort of just like a you know just professional warriors are doing doing whatever needs to get done and it's a little vague in terms of what exactly how they're fighting and how they're committing violence on the ground but I think what's really interesting is that out of these seven Athenian sources five of them specifically mentioned Cretans looting and pillaging and even described at times Cretans going out of their way to go loot and pillage and breaking you know the expectations you know and in the in the Hellenica they're they're not where they're supposed to be because they decided to go loot Nafplio instead of be where they're supposed to be so this emphasis on in our sources on how they're obsessed with looting I think fits very well with this transition into thinking about organized violence on the island as a as a what's your how you turn your military power into economic power and this focus on collecting war booty as a sort of way of expressing your elitist and masculinity so here's my age three warrior I don't have any archaeological evidence for this period so I'm guessing from art I think there's still a big focus on what makes a man like anatomically a man so the male the male body but again this new focus on collecting wealth and using your body and your manliness and your elitist to produce wealth for the community so here's the overarching idea in terms of the ideological shifts you have these dueling ideologies the ideology camaraderie in the army one mentality happening in the seventh and sixth centuries really concentrated based on where the spaces are that they're that these objects are appearing and these this art is appearing with some some differences and some exceptions and these two ideas are sort of coalescing into the phase three which is this thinking about rather than thinking about how elites are expressing their elitist and their masculinity it's about focusing instead on what they do with that elitist and that masculinity and I think in a lot of ways it has to do with how the community is sort of taking over in every instance of this the Cretans are fighting in small groups where they are doing specific things on the battlefield and they're like these really high highly decorated and very fully kitted out leisure class hoplites and this is all happening before the advent of the Theven sacred band which is going to roll can I dike and many other scholars so the first instance of the institutionalization of epilectoi so the first time any mainland Greek community has a solid state funded group of men that are paid to fight in small groups and take specific objectives so in many ways the Cretans in all these texts are sort of fighting as protoepilectoi and so this is perhaps an interesting way to think about how the ideologies on Crete that are shifting and changing over time are building into this larger phenomenon that then would have much larger ramifications for the way that Greeks are committing violence and also how three people in general are Greek history I guess in the way that these are things are happening so thank you very much thank you Jesse that was fascinating I want to invite people to oh Kim you're still here if you want to moderate the questions so feel free to jump in or it looks like we have lots of questions great so oh no those were clapping hands all right those were clapping hands yeah I'll see if anybody has said if anyone has a question for for Jesse pipe pipe on in or I raise your hand one of the other it'd be great Paula hi Jesse I sort of thought maybe I would I would alert you that I was going to pop in and the knife I didn't so hi it's been it's been great to hear more about your project I think I understand better now what you're doing that's pretty exciting I have lots of little questions um that I won't I won't raise now but I have one sort of larger question which has to do with your transition in the economic aspects of warfare and the control of the of the armor and that has to do with the fact that it's all found in sanctuaries correct you distinguish between regional and urban sanctuaries fine um we have the epigraphic evidence that suggests that at some point we certainly do have the community intervening in the the distribution of the booty um but I'm not sure that for the your phase one and maybe at least the early parts of your phase two that you have the evidence to decide who's making those dedications whether it is an individual and whether that dedication is one's own armor or whether it's captured armor we can certainly say that with the inscribed so-called a fratty armor but with the other I don't think we can make the claim um that this is all private and individual rather than in some way a collective action so I would uh see I would agree with you I think I yeah I I think uh that it doesn't um in the earliest parts it could very well be the case and I think that uh the problem is we just don't know so uh it could be individual it could be some sort of community dedication I think it's really interesting that in the fifth century uh the evidence seems pretty clear that extra urban sanctuaries are done by the community as a poll uh and there's no evidence for urban sanctuary dedications but it seems like especially well we have Gorton, Tilesos, Canosos and Axos they all seem to be focusing on extra urban sanctuaries as places where the city gets to determine what's what's dedicated to those and we also have the fact that all the extra urban sanctuaries and their archaeological evidence uh in the late seventh century which is probably part of the dating problem for Cree so um we really have no idea for the earlier periods unfortunately I don't know if it necessarily changes the fact that those ideologies exist which is more of what I'm trying to uh promote but there are different ideologies in different spaces which I think uh whether or not the community is doing it or the elites are doing it you know how much of the community is being controlled by the andray on this elite club of of of uh men uh I don't necessarily have a answer to that question yet so I'm I'm leaving it open uh because uh I'm only trying I can only say only so much at this point with the evidence that we have and saying that it exists I think is all I can really say but there is this distinction okay thanks yeah any other questions for Jesse is that is serious please yeah I just wanted to ask about um the so the this elite masculine ideology associated possibly with um hunting uh do you have you or are there's archaeological assemblages that you could draw on for the evidence for things like bore and deer and the kinds of things that might be um part of that kind of hunting of scary things by elites well this is one of the this is why uh this is why part two is uh temporary because uh there there does exist these large collections but no one has studied them yet so uh there is a lot of evidence from some of the older excavated sites and they're just sitting in boxes uh you know no one has touched them yet so once we get to do a little bit more uh archaeology on the Iron Age uh Crete Crete archaeology is dominated by Bronze Age people so once more Iron Age archaeology is done we can actually probably say more about uh how hunting is operating and working uh yeah but one day it's a good it's a good approach to the methodology though I'll say just a specter from the Bronze Age that you you know you not only can you turn up um some unexpected faunal material in different um in in domestic context that you wouldn't expect that clearly had to have been a result of hunting but that we also potentially if if some isotope analysis is done on that you can also tell if we have some evidence from earlier of course on the mainland that some wild species are actually being controlled and raised so that they'll be easier to hunt than they would be otherwise we find that in some of our deer so that I would be that would seems to be like a place with what you're describing that it could that could be a possibility in that period to be very interesting yeah that'd be super cool I the one of the problems with Crete and archaeology is that there is a lot of difference between all the cities so Azoria has been really well excavated and there has been a lot of work done on on their uh on their bones on their animal bones uh but there's no arrowheads so as opposed to a friday which is covered in arrowheads uh and no one has studied into the bones so uh yeah there's just differences between them so one day we'll be able to figure out more and I think there's going to be a difference between various parts of Crete but at this point the evidence is just so sparse that we need to sort of talk about Crete is a uh this is these are the sorts of ideas that are floating around and you know that sort of thing that's sort of way a little more nebulous at this point great any other questions for Jesse today Emily yeah thank you Jesse um so really wonderful um presentation very very um dynamic with all of your all of your graphs it gave us a really great way to see um how your evidence is shaking out um inevitably my question is a historians question um I I find it um a bit of a stretch of the imagination to suppose that um there was no warfare of the kind that one normally associates with that word in other words armed conflicts between communities uh in let's say your phase two um and I you know while I uh while I applaud the the care with which you're trying to to highlight the evidence that we actually have I want to ask you if you could comment on how the evidence that you're seeing for that period I'm I'm thinking especially of your phase two army of one mentality right is there a way to square the evidence that we do have with a plausible but not demonstrated reality that communities were fighting one another I mean I can just take mainland Greece as an example in the same period we have lots and lots of interpolity armed conflict especially over resources boundaries sanctuaries that kind of thing so can you just sort of walk us through how you would think about potentially reconciling the evidence that you have now with with that scenario in which there actually was armed conflict between communities I think so I think we need to find the spaces in which this evidence is going to be appearing because uh the cemeteries that we have are very elite cemeteries for this period uh and uh so I I always think about uh sparta uh in the in the persian wars and how their army was composed of about 80 slaves so I'm looking at what elites are doing and how they're talking about violence and I think it's very possible that there's like one or two of these guys and then hundreds of slaves in their armies at this period and we really know nothing about we know we know some things about slavery on crete in this period but but a lot of it is speculation and we're still having a really hard time pinpointing and figuring that out and I think what grace arney is doing in her survey data uh is reassessing what these what we do have and what we're looking at I think that might be a way to start thinking about where the slaves are and how these communities are really being organized how much of the hierarchy is there uh and if it's anything like sparta which everyone likes to say that crete is like sparta but there is some good reason for that and there's some bad reasons that that's not true I don't think that I don't I would I don't like the idea of them being dorian I like cretins being cretins but uh if there is something comparable to that and we can sort of see how uh slave armies are a big part in the palpines of big part of the palpines in the fifth century and late sixth century so maybe we can sort of think about how the creten armies would have been composed and then look for that evidence in the spaces where those people are we're looking right now for evidence of interstate uh polity interpoly violence in the spaces of elites and it's pretty clear to me that that is not what we're finding we're finding an ideology that elites have if we really want to find intrapoly warfare we need to probably look at where the slaves are instead which as I said I think what grace is doing in survey data is is probably the best bet for that uh the the sanctuaries themselves are are are for uh the wealthiest I think so I hope that answers your question it does it doesn't totally satisfy my concern though because I'm I mean I'm thinking about obviously we can talk about this later but maybe it's sort of interesting to those assembled to to sort of have part of this conversation because it's methodological also right um if we were to take away from say the mainland greek context the kinds of evidence that you don't have for crete what remit how different would would the the mainland greek situation look from the creten situation based on what remains right the the style the style of um of the arms and the armor that are dedicated at prominent sanctuaries might look a little bit different but the stuff that survives in those contexts definitely looks elite and yet we know from literary and epigraphic uh evidence um that the that many of these objects stem from um you know uh factual uh interstate conflicts so it seems like there's there this is primarily a problem of evidence um so well I think you're uh you're touching on my next project I think because because I think that that's absolutely true if you take away if you look at the mainland and you look at what I've discovered in terms of creten uh approaches to organized violence there's going to be a lot of parallel and so I think this is going to really dovetail with what role can I like and a lot of the sort of modern uh revisionist military historians have been talking about and that we need to reassess what creten warfare really was and the ancient world and so I think what I'm finding in this sort of like elite approaches to it as being this venue for ideological expression and elitness and masculinity more so than as a as a way of uh conquering or or or uh things like that might actually fit very well with the evidence for the mainland and it might force us to sort of reassess what's going on there uh there's a there's a scholar working in the Near East who was actually broken apart ways of committing organized violence into into various categories and there's conquest and there's raiding and there's sieging and there's naval operations and for for us in the Greek world we just sort of assume that all warfare was about conquering we don't really think about the fact that if you're going to go on a raid to get a bunch of movable property you're not going to prepare for it in the same way that you would if you were going to go conquer the land or or even siege the land and so there's a there's good reason to think that there's different types of organized violence types of warfare happening on Crete uh we've just been sort of uh doing a one-size fits all especially you know post-orthodox everyone's just trying to get one Greek type warfare to fit everything so by looking at Crete in specifics I think I eventually will be able to turn once I have this evidence for this regional space I'll be able to turn to the mainland and say well actually we might need to reassess what's going on there too because uh we're sort of assuming that it's it's one size fits all uh uh yeah I do think that they're definitely still fighting though I think that there definitely are major armies you know clashing on Crete in these periods it's just it's just we need to be a lot more careful with how we're thinking about that how that's working for the community and the economies and the politics of the communities thanks jesse okay anything anything last minute we've been over time so I guess we'll thank everybody for coming and thank you jesse so much for presenting your work to us fascinating still I again the more we find the more we'll know so that'll be our mandate going forward thank you jesse thanks you everyone have a good day bye thank you