 Okay, perhaps before I start, I announced this title like months and months ago But I want to change it in the meantime, but I haven't changed it But I would rather be like boundary maintenance than an archaeology of resistance But if one believes the likes of Brodell, Horden, Brucell or Brutbank, the Mediterranean has always been an open sea as Manning recently called it, an area in which connectivity played a major role, where mobility, exchange and communication were of prime importance where human societies and relations were entangled, but they see itself and most of the contributions of this workshop session actually pay attention to this interaction and I'm not going to go against that either, so far Coastal and island communities, it is argued, developed networks with some sites gradually being promoted as Emporia or Hubs, where goods and services were collected and distributed through terrestrial or maritime networks It was surely disentanglement, so to say, that resulted in a remarkable cultural uniformity and cultural grandeur at a series of punctuated moments during this long history of this extended sea land Through a web of interconnectedness, people moved, new ideas spread, and objects were traded Now, while advances in DNA and various types of isotope research have been instrumental in framings of processes of exchange and mobility it is especially social network analysis, following in the footsteps of world system theory and peer-poly interaction, which has proved to be a powerful tool in the simulation of past interaction This, as argued by a call NAPET, when Fominanti and NAPET have worked on this, is because it allowed moving beyond simple distribution maps and paying attention to the sites itself to nodes, to connectivity, to directionality and to frequency Likewise, various types of GIS and spatial modeling have helped considerably in flashing out earlier studies that were simply based on shared material cultural attributes or the movement of commodities from one to another The force of both social network analysis and GIS lies, however, in the recognition of presence, not of absence of sites, features, or shared material cultural between spatially distinct nodes as proxies for human interaction And although Kossinets and as well as Bevan and Wilson have discussed the importance of absent variables resulting from an incomplete record or recovery bias, in a general remedial way to reconstruct spatial or social networks My paper looks especially in the potential alternatives to explain such absences to look at those that seemingly state outside or neglected by networks and I do this focusing again on the island of Crete and its Manoan or Bronze Age culture Bevan and Wilson start from the assumption that quite a few sites had not yet been identified or localized and by using spatial modeling were able to fill in the landscape and to visualize flows between settlements and reconstruct potential hierarchies and territorial organizations Their analysis, combined with that of Nappet Rivers and Evans on Crete's international network and a good deal of other material cultural studies, and I'll just show you the recent volume by Gorgogianni at Ali gives the impression that Crete was a very connected and tangled island indeed both internally and externally linked and it's very likely that this was truly the case However, while such approaches are useful to obtain general synthetic historical reconstructions they are largely based on positive evidence, the presence of imports While neglecting or downscaling the fact that most sites have not or barely yielded the material correlates which would allow them to take up convincing positions as nodes in some kind of maritime network In fact, Exotica on Crete are rare, there I say overrated For most of its Bronze Age history, if they show up at all they form a tiny percentage of all kinds, much less than one percent of the finds in each site This can be compared, for example, with late Bronze Age pila coquino cremos on cypress where imponds form almost 20% of the encountered material and sometimes it actually increases by context What we do observe, however, is much minor material in off island sites At Accoriteri on Santorini, this is around 15% While on Kithara, it said almost to be entirely Minoan, at least according to sources in Napa and Nicolapulu This clearly shows the Minoans entanglement with the wider Ijean or Mediterranean world It's almost like finding Chinese products everywhere, but nothing foreign in China itself In the rest of this paper, I will only consider material evidence which certainly formed a small percentage of exchangeable commodities such as perishable goods, foodstuffs, textiles, intangible ideas, technology as human traffic but these need much more sophisticated analysis to be appreciated If we look at the Crete in evidence, and check where foreign products primarily and consistently show up comos, poros, poros and mochlos, these are port sites, or anchorage sites if you wish that are secondary in the local settlement territory, respectively on the south and northeast coast These are maybe what you could call gateway communities but they are not primary centers where their respective regions are concerned And the presence of exotica in these three sites is with regard to other Cretan sites proportionally relatively higher throughout the various periods of Minoan history and this is why they are usually regarded as gateway communities sites through which exotic goods enter the island, and from which, it is usually orchid they were distributed or proliferated It's Branigan's original 1991 idea Papadas and Tomkins, for instance, conclude that trading was not a widely accessible venture but was controlled by groups or individuals, located in a few large trading communities Again, these are secondary sites, these are not major sites This may have been so, so, these trading communities but is there really evidence that these exotic goods subsequently arrived or filtered through the other settlements? In fact, this outside these gateway communities, foreign goods are really scarce And despite long histories of excavation, the main palatial settlements Cnosos, Festos and Malja have yielded very few imports and these only change somewhat in the Mycenaean period, late in my own 3A where Cnosos is concerned, at least Two further examples where I've been or I'm working myself, that is, Aleykas through an East Crete, is following 100 years intermittently of archeological research A large and important settlement, located on primarily land and sea routes with visual linkage to the Dodecanese So if you act on a good day, you can see actually Castles and then next Carcadas, Rhodes and Anatolia Possessing an important agricultural hinterland and undoubtedly at the top of a regional settlement hierarchy So all conditions are in fact met to see it as an important note in an overseas network And foreign products are really rare, trinkets as it were Like occasional things that show up Same goes for the site that we've been digging at, like at Sisi On the north coast of the island, only three kilometers from the palatial center of Malja That also located on really very good communication arteries Has a long history and has been extensively excavated But no foreign products at all So this absence seems almost certainly not a recovery bias So we should ask why sites that are ideally located on appropriate sea currents Lack distinctive and recognizable exotic material culture Well, we know that in general that the island was in close contact With the rest of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean As hinted by these gateway communities mentioned So how can we explain this absence? In regions with strong state interference Trade monopolies and embargoes Trade monopolies and embargoes may have existed We know through texts, for instance, that a recline has been treated That rulers occasionally used such embargoes as a political tool And so during a specific period of the Bronze Age And I suppose you were actually hinting at that Hittite finds, for example, a quasi absent from the Mediterranean And so that has been interpreted as an embargo While a treaty between Hittites and Amur of 1250 BC Also called for a mutual trade embargo against the Ossirians A Magarian decree proposed by Pericles in 433 Excluded merchants from Athenian markets at ports And Romans and Cartagenaeans have also regularly imposed Such bans on each other Emburgers, however, would result in the general and not selected absence of Exotica And since Exotica are somehow present in ports This explanation does not seem applicable Still, a local embargo could have prevented their proliferation Outside their palms of arrival Now, in the art of not being governed James Scott, inspired by Pierre Clastres' Society Against the State Discusses modern-day communities That willingly and reactively remain outside nation-states For the fear of being exploited Developing way of escapism Communities like these often look for borderlands or shatter zones And Alfredo Gonzales Rebal, he's there but he's certainly present somewhere On three groups in Western Ethiopia is a good case study With material culture used to underline independence and resistance But these authors wrote from a clear anarchist perspective While cultural resistance does not need a particular political condition To be operational In fact, a culture of resistance and the creation of physical or social boundaries To enable continual existence of traditions Is what both called boundary maintenance And through the construction of social confines Communities or groups are able to maintain their identity When members interact with others When members interact with others, they do this especially in fact This not only demands the creation of group membership criteria And ways of signaling on these But also indicates a conscious structuring of interactions Which allows the persistence of the cultural differences It is an us and them game This happens at all scales from the household To the level of the largest community And often takes the form of purposeful or imposed choices Made through material culture As McGuire and Painter for instance or Riker have shown Boundary maintenance however reinforces a group's unity And distinctness by emphasizing traits That set its member apart from others Although it's mostly studied as a strategy To protect the exploitation of spatially restricted resources And especially marine ones especially It is also a protective mechanism Against cultural debt In which through a total acculturation The disappearance of local culture is avoided And so not as a joke But perhaps the Amish community can be mentioned As an eloquent but quite extreme example Of such boundary maintenance But it is a community of practice That is encountered in many societies In specific archaeological contexts Boundary maintenance and process of resistance Have successfully been employed to explain For instance anomalous mortuary ceremonialism In pre-contact Vermont Or a particular style of personal ornaments Setting locals apart from incoming Neolithic farmers in Europe Or copper age tribal societies On the great Hungarian plain as Parkinson has shown Or even the maintenance of Philistine identity In the early Iron Age Doric Sparta and Crete II Among archaic Greek city-states Were known for their practices Of cultural resistance And the ethnic label 80 Cretans Or true Cretans may refer to this As Whitley suggested But these examples illustrate The use of material culture in helping to shape And to maintain boundaries And hence community identity And practices through which Social cultural differences And community communicated Act hence as a defensive mechanism The isolated exotic object Does not change this perception Since either it may have been stigmatized Or it was not considered sensitive It didn't matter In the latter case it may have crossed Group boundaries and be adopted Or adapted as we see for instance On Crete with another monster The transformation of the Egyptian In the Mino ingenious Or with several technologies Including the Potterswheel Didn't matter too much It was interesting But boundary maintenance In particular allows us to stress Cretan particularism And the originality of its Bronze Age culture And the many forms it took The stress on the central court For instance And its accessibility in public structures For example for the gathering As Piotr has mentioned But also the link with the natural environment And religious practices are concerned And later its attention to Primary female divinity The key cultural traits that may be Considered as meaningful locally Abound in the Minoan material record Dress and hairstyle for instance Are very typical Minoan But also model plaster and fresco Shapes and decorative styles of pottery Symbolism such as double acts Et cetera The list is without an ending You may be confident that things like Food and language were likewise Primary remarkers Minoans it appears wanted to be Recognizable as such This distinctive material cultural And at first glance unreceptiveness Towards external influences However can only be appreciated While taking into account The island's primary position Within a network of entanglements In the Eastern Mediterranean context It was because of this primary entanglement That Cretans developed and adhered To their own specific cultural item Which set them apart from their neighbors It is this what made them Cretans It was an intentional and deliberate move To protect local customs within a world That became more and more international And globalized It must be added that this general Unreceptiveness to foreign features Appears to have been temporally charged And especially a middle and early Late Bronze Age feature of Cretan society This then may in fact imply That it is a conscious reaction Against experiences in the past Exotica in fact do seem to have Occupied a very important place In the advertisement of local identity And the construction of vertical differentiation During the early Bronze Age Has been shown and very studied By Cynthia Caldern and especially It was surely because of their use And such vertical differentiation Blatant show off That they were largely discouraged Or rejected in a society That seemed to have advertised More egalitarian principles Corporatism and collective identity That's the ideology it doesn't mean That it was true in reality It is then perhaps no surprise That when the court centered buildings Which we know as palaces Are built early in the middle Bronze Age Foreign Exotica do no longer play A role in local identity construction And advertisement So to conclude The Mediterranean Sea While it may have been something like A no man's land and an interface That allows free and human connections Between various groups Also acted as a borderland And a barrier that helped The creation of local identities Or a receptiveness or not An active use or not Of foreign material culture The island of Crete With its enduring network of multiple entanglements After a period of trial and error Seemed to have consciously And deliberately steered away From the use of Exotica Because its potential use in a vertical hierarchy Made it incompatible With local sensitivities And an ideology of collectiveness Even if this was evidently A mirage Thank you