SISSI, CRETE—An international team of archaeologists under the direction of Jan Driessen of the Belgian School at Athens, in collaboration with Greece’s Lasithi Antiquities Ephorate, has conducted excavations at a Minoan-era settlement in eastern Crete. This season, the team members uncovered a monumental building destroyed by fire around 2500 B.C. What was left of this structure was incorporated in about 1700 B.C. into a complex of monumental buildings, arranged around a central court measuring more than 100 feet long. The complex featured decorated plaster flooring and a terracotta drain. A box-shaped grave containing a woman’s intact skeleton dating to the post-Minoan era was uncovered near this building site. She had been buried with a copper mirror with an ivory handle, copper dress pins, and a necklace made up of 15 olive-shaped gold beads and smaller gold beads. The researchers said such graves are usually discovered at the Minoan sites of Archanes and Knossos, near Crete’s north-central coast, and the site of Chania further to the west. To read about a burial discovered at the site of Pylos that incorporated both Minoan and Mycenaean cultural artifacts, go to "World of the Griffin Warrior."
