Decolonising Minoan Archaeology: Museum Perspectives Past and Present

Abstract

Archaeological assemblages from Minoan Crete (c. 3100-1100 BCE) have been studied and displayed in museums for over one hundred years. During that time, Minoan archaeology has flourished as a discipline, but no in-depth, diachronic analysis of Minoan material in different museums has been attempted, nor has there been systematic study of trends in those exhibitions. This thesis fills this gap in scholarship by offering a critical study of the intellectual history of Minoan museum displays, focusing on two case studies: the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the British Museum in London. I track the interactions between Minoan scholarship, the museum space, the public, and national politics. One specific focus is how Minoan displays have been influenced by, replicate or respond to colonialist narratives. Colonialism has had tangible effects on Greece's history, but it also operates on an ideological level. From the beginning of large scale excavations in Crete by European and American archaeologists, Minoan civilisation was narrativised as the precursor to modern European society, which required that this prestigious past be disassociated from modern Greece. Control of how that past was studied and displayed is a direct result of colonial power. Minoan archaeology has also been heavily racialised due to Arthur Evans' contributions and his positioning of the Minoans as the first 'European' ethnic group. For these reasons, I take advantage of recent interest in decolonising museums to revisit Minoan material. There are many aspects of this history, however, which cannot be fully appreciated from an exclusively postcolonial perspective; my analysis of colonialist discourses within the history of Minoan studies benefits from and is enriched by a holistic approach to the subject, drawing additionally on the fields of museum studies, materiality studies, meta-archaeology, and historiography. Ultimately I study how the museums drew, and continue to draw, Minoan civilisation into wider dominant narratives about the ancient past.