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

Emanuela Santaniello & Simona Todaro In F. Longo, R. di Cesare & S. Privitera (eds) 2016. ΔΡΟΜΟΙ. Studi sul mondo antico offerti a Emanuele Greco dagli allievi della Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene, Atene-Paestum: 99-110.

This paper presents a joint project of two former students of the Italian School of Archaeology at Athens who decided to reconsider the much debated issue of the origin of the polis of Gortyn in south-central Crete by reconstructing the settlement history 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 the seminars of urban-planning and topography that were introduced to the school programme by E. Greco, and are still ongoing.

Although some preliminary results have already been achieved, the main aim of the paper is to present the potential of a research project that was conducted from two different perspectives – Minoan and classical – following a bottom up approach.