Making mountains out of molehills in the Bronze Age Aegean: visibility, ritual kits, and the idea of a peak sanctuary

Cretan peak sanctuaries have long attracted interest for their topographical characteristics, and several studies have emphasized the inter-visibility of groups of peak sanctuaries, and their location within sight of settlements and upland pastures. By contrast, it is argued here that, while the prominence of peak sanctuaries within the landscape clearly contributed to their wide and rapid spread as a type of ritual space, the location on a mountain peak may have been secondary to the cult objects and equipment used in structuring and transmitting the ritual practices that took place there. Using polythetic classification to determine the basic range of artefacts that constitutes a peak sanctuary-like assemblage, several non-mountain locations are identified at which ‘peak sanctuary’ rituals appear to have taken place, indicating that the idea of a peak sanctuary was locally adaptable and that visibility and landscape location were perhaps less important to peak sanctuary cult than traditionally supposed.

Keywords

• Ritual,
• peak sanctuary,
• artefact assemblages,
• transmission,
• Crete,
• polythetic classification