Alan Peatfield

• University College Dublin

The largest corpus of clay figurines from the Cretan Bronze Age comes from ritual mountain sites known as peak sanctuaries. In this paper, we explore how the ‛Figures in 3D’ project contributes to our understanding of these figurines, aiding in the study of the technologies of figurine construction and the typological analysis of distinctive styles...

In many regions of Europe, bronze metalwork survives in excellent states of preservation that enable us to examine traces of use on objects that are indicative of the ways in which they were used. This is a relatively young field of archaeometric research and the methodologies employed are as yet to be consolidated. A systematic relationship typica...

Previous work by the authors has argued for a shamanic element to Cretan Bronze Age religion. Late Minoan gold rings with engraved ritual scenes show clear affinities with imagery expressive of ecstatic religious experience in other ancient and traditional societies. We interpret the clay figurines from Minoan peak sanctuaries as similarly expressi...

The origins of this paper lay in an archaeological problem: the understanding of the variety of gestures of clay figurines we had excavated from a mountain peak sanctuary of the Cretan Bronze Age. As we discuss in greater detail below, such figurines from other peak sanctuaries, portraying the worshippers at the sanctuary, have been usually interpr...