Pseira

Pseira (Greek Ψείρα) is an islet in the Gulf of Mirabello in northeastern Crete with the archaeological remains of Minoan and Mycenean civilisation.

The island was explored in 1906–07 by Richard Seager and partially documented by Halvor Bagge in ink and watercolors based on photographs (University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 1910), and more minutely examined in 1984–92 by Philip P. Betancourt and Costis Davaras, for Temple University. Archaeological materials in this seaport, sited above its harbor, to which it was connected by cliffside stairs, span the period from the end of the Neolithic in the 4th millennium to the Late Bronze Age, with the cultural high point being Early Minoan to Late Minoan IB. At that time the prosperous town of some 60 buildings was ranged round its open square (plateia), with a single large building that occupied one side. Like many contemporary Late Minoan IB sites, it was violently destroyed, ca 1550–1450 BC. A remnant of its population cleared spaces in the rubble and for a time continued to dwell in the ruined town.

A Minoan seal-stone from the site representing a ship is a reminder that the harbour was essential. The Minoan community supported itself by fishing and subsistence agriculture. They deeply tilled and terraced agricultural sites where they manured the thin limy soil with human waste from the settlement. They did not enclose their planting sites, as the island's much later Byzantine practice was, a sign that goats did not roam free in Minoan Pseira; neither were pigs kept. Dams collected seasonal run-off, for water was scarce on the island, though the Aegean region was less dry in the second millennium BC than now.

Consistent with the long period of occupation, burials in the necropolis west of the town are of five kinds: Neolithic rock shelter burials; cist graves built of vertical slabs with Cycladic parallels; small rock-built tombs; jar burials; and tombs imitating houses. Artifacts from the necropolis included clay vases, stone vessels, obsidian, bronze tools and jewelry. Burials broke off in Middle Minoan, before the town underwent its Late Minoan expansion. The Late Minoan I building that occupies the northern side of the plateia, cautiously identified as a "civic shrine", featured painted stucco bas-reliefs in its upper floor and retains a fresco fragment of two women in Minoan dress of complicated woven design who face one another. Excavations at Pseira have been clouded by successive development in prehistoric stages obfuscating respective earlier stages, in contrast with more clearly defined strata in Knossos, for example.

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