Long-Term Grain Storage and Political Economy in Bronze Age Crete: Contextualizing Ayia Triada's Silo-Complexes

Since the beginnings of the archaeological exploration of Crete, agricultural storage has attracted plenty of scholarly interest. The discovery of several palaces in the island, in particular, provided a variegated evidence concerning storage, one which encompassed the development of a complex written accountability, the production of thousands storage jars, and the building of storerooms as well as built installations devoted to long-term airtight storage (so-called kouloures at the palaces of Knossos, Malia, and Phaistos). However, the presence in non palatial sites of storage complexes, which can be plausibly interpreted as silo-complexes, has been substantially overshadowed. This paper is concerned with the Late Bronze Age evidence of Ayia Triada in the Mesara plain, which encompasses four such complexes, two of which still unpublished. By drawing on recent field-work by the author, in particular, it contrasts these buildings with those of other Mycenaean and Near-Eastern sites, in order to set Ayia Triada in its wider Aegean and Mediterranean context. While incorporating information retrieved in the local Linear A and non-local Linear B documents, moreover, this paper highlights the role that airtight storage played within the political economy of the state centered upon this site in the 14th -13th c. B.C.E.