In 1999, Coldstream et al. described a gap in our historical record for the Eastern Mediterranean island of Crete in the sixth century BCE as the “Archaic Gap.” This lacuna in our evidence unfortunately occurred at a vitally important period for our understanding of mixed constitutional governments in the ancient Mediterranean: the Cretans had the earliest inscribed laws in Europe and the island was a conduit for political, military, and economic ideas between Africa, Europe, and Asia. Various attempts have been made to fill the Archaic Gap, but these contributions depended heavily on outdated and highly problematic paradigms. They assumed a Eurocentric worldview that emphasized the importance of “Western Civilization” over Asian and African peoples. They painted the Cretans as a semi-Hellenized other who accidentally stumbled into remarkably resilient armed oligarchies dependent on isolationist exploitation.

Using digital humanities tools, Dr. Jesse Obert's book project returns to our primary sources and paints a different picture of the island. He illustrates how past approaches cherry-picked our evidence to promote problematic narratives. Digital humanities allows us to visualize all the archaeological, artistic, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence in a single graph – both that evidence that previous scholars cherry-picked and that evidence they set aside and considered outliers to their paradigm. Taking a fresh look at the primary sources, he argues that Cretan communities institutionalized violence and elite competition in order to create complex constitutional systems that reinvested elite wealth into the local economy by making it accessible for public loans and credit. Although the state of our evidence thwarts any sort of linear historical narrative for Archaic Crete, we can still learn a lot about how warrior and elite identities influenced the political and social development of some of the earliest city-states in ancient Greece.

This event is part of the series Silence in the Narrative: The Politics of Absence in Accounts of the Global Past.