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Flower lovers, after all? Rethinking

religion and human-environment
relations in Minoan Crete
Vesa-Pekka Herva

Abstract
That the natural world was imbued with symbolic and religious meaning in Minoan Crete has been
suggested since the early days of Minoan archaeology. Notwithstanding, it often remains unclear
how certain constituents of the physical environment acquired specic meanings, and what such
meanings imply for the actual dynamics of human-environment relations. This paper considers the
relationship between (what is today construed as) religion and human engagement with the
environment in Minoan Crete. An ecological perspective is adopted which assumes that both
organisms and inanimate objects are a result of and subject to continuous development, and their
identity is dened by the network of relationships they are endowed with. The idea is put forward
that the relationship between people and certain landscape elements were of a social kind, based on
mutuality and intimacy, and that some activities conventionally identied as religious or ritual are
better understood in terms of practical engagement with the physical environment.

Keywords
Development; human-environment relations; Minoan Crete; non-human persons; relationality;
religion.

Introduction
Natural places, Bradley writes, have an archaeology because they acquired signicance
in the minds of people in the past (2000: 35). Notwithstanding, it often remains unclear
how certain constituents of the environment acquired specic meanings in the mind and
what such meanings imply for the actual dynamics of human-environment relations in the
past. In the Minoan culture of Bronze Age Crete (c. 33001100 BC), there seems to have
been a close relationship between the natural world and what is today construed as
religion. Scholarly attitudes towards this phenomenon vary, but it has traditionally been
World Archaeology Vol. 38(4): 586598 Debates in World Archaeology
2006 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online
DOI: 10.1080/00438240600963114

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considered to indicate that a goddess of nature was central to the Minoan belief system
and, by extension, the natural world invested with religious or symbolic meanings (e.g.
Marinatos 1993).
This paper addresses the relationship between religion and the perception of, and
engagement with, the environment in Minoan Crete. My aim is to present an idea on the
nature of that relationship from an ecological perspective, which draws inspiration
especially from ecological psychology (e.g. Gibson 1986) and developmental systems
theory (e.g. Oyama 2000; Oyama et al. 2001a). This approach proposes that a mechanistic
worldview and organism-environment dualism, although useful for certain purposes, limit
our understanding of human-environment relations in Minoan Crete and beyond. The
ecological perspective, as a kind of thought experiment, might provide heuristic value for
reconsidering certain aspects life in Bronze Age Crete. Most importantly, I suggest that at
least some activities conventionally identied as religious or ritual are better understood in
terms of engagement with the environment, that is, essentially practical ways of knowing
and living with the surrounding world, which humans co-inhabited with various kinds of
non-human persons. Ironically, in this view, the term ower lovers, which is sometimes
used in Minoan archaeology to ridicule the romantic vision of the Minoans created by
Arthur Evans and others (Starr 1984; see also Bintli 1984), captures something important
about human-environment relations in Bronze Age Crete. Since expanding these ideas is
the main objective of the present paper, only certain general features of the Minoan
archaeological record are discussed below; a more detailed analysis of archaeological data
will be subject to future study.

Religion, ritual and relationality

A conventional view in Minoan archaeology holds that religion is a system of beliefs
related to the existence of divine beings and (religious) ritual, and a means of summoning
and/or communicating with such entities (e.g. Warren 1988: 346; Dickinson 1994: 257
60; cf. Peateld 2001: 514). Rituals ensured successful life because the divinity was
believed to have control over all aspects of the natural and created worlds (Warren 1988:
34). Over the last decades, it has also become common to regard Minoan religion and
ritual primarily as social and ideological phenomena, which created cohesion in society on
the one hand and dierentiated social groups on the other (e.g. Vansteenhuyse 2002: 242
4; Adams 2004: 30). In this perspective, religion and ritual are metaphors of social life and
reproduce social order. Recently, the performative, experiential and sensory aspects of
rituals have also been emphasized (e.g. Hamilakis 1999; Peateld 2001). This approach
redenes the signicance of ritual to some extent, or adds a new dimension to it, but the
basic function of rituals continues to be conceptualized in terms of the supernatural and/
or the manipulation of social identities and power relations (e.g. Hamilakis 1999; Morris
2004: 42).
What these views have in common is that they regard rituals as acts which do not so
much do something as say something, or more properly, perhaps, do something
through saying something (to adapt a passage from Campbell (1995: 115) where he
describes sociological views on consumption). This attitude to ritual is not peculiar to

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Minoan archaeology, of course, but represents a common pattern of thought in

archaeology, anthropology and the Western world in general (see Bruck 1999). The
tendency to consider ritual in terms of the symbolic a means of doing something
through saying something seems reasonable because odd activities towards stones
(Fig. 1), for example, would appear to be an inecient way of manipulating the physical
environment; a stone is a stone whether or not it is touched in the manner depicted in
Minoan art. While planting crops appears to make a functional sense whether or not
beliefs are involved, odd activities towards stones seem comprehensible only in relation
with the inner mental world of the Minoans.
It has been a dictum in Western thought for several centuries now that the real physical
world is composed of things that possess only quantitative properties, whereas qualitative
aspects of the world are products of the mind (Manzotti 2006). Physical objects in this
view have intrinsic and xed properties and can eectively be manipulated only through
mechanical causation (see further, Bruck 1999: 31420; Grin 2000: esp. 11016, 20810).
The integrity of objects is thought not to depend on their relations with other objects;
relationships and interaction between things are construed as something less primitive and
less real than supposedly autonomous existence. In other words, Western thought gives
ontological priority to things over relations between them and to form over process
(Goodwin 1988; Ingold 2000; see also Manzotti 2006).

Figure 1 Activities involving stones and trees as depicted on a gold ring from Kalyvia (drawn by
V.-P. Herva after Platon and Pini 1984: no. 114).

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The world in ecological terms, however, is primarily about relationships and process. The
rst premise is that organism and environment do not constitute two interacting systems, but
one indivisible and dynamic organism-environment system (Gibson 1986; Clark 1997;
Ingold 2000; Oyama et al. 2001a). Turners (2000, 2004) discussion of the extended
organism illustrates in a striking manner the interdependence between organism and its
environment. He demonstrates, for instance, that the mounds of Macrotermes michaelseni
are not merely manifestations of termite behaviour, but living external organs that constitute
a part of termites respiratory physiology. Similarly, it follows from ecological thinking that
mind and agency are properties of entire human-environment systems and not reducible to
the workings of the human brain; cognitive processes are external to humans as much as they
are internal (Hutchins 1995; Clark 1997; Jarvilehto 1998; Knappett 2005; Malafouris 2005).
It also follows that the properties of things are context-dependent and relational rather than
intrinsic they are not simply possessed by things themselves nor construed in the mind
(Gibson 1986: 12743; Knappett 2005: 457; see also below).
The idea of non-human entities as active agents is a familiar one in archaeology and
material culture studies (e.g. Gell 1998; DeMarrais et al. 2005), but it can be carried
further than is usually done if a developmental aspect is integrated into it. Namely, both
organisms and things are a result of and subject to constant development, and the identity
of all entities is relationally constituted, that is, determined by their physical, biological
and social relationships with the other constituents of a given system (Jarvilehto 1994:
1912; Ingold 2000; Oyama et al. 2001a; Knappett 2005). In Batesons (2000 [1972]: 153;
also cf. Gell 1998: 123) words, we must think rst of the relationships and consider the
relata as dened solely by their relationships.

Stranger aspects of Minoan religion

Groenewegen-Frankfort (1951: 206) noticed over fty years ago that, since Minoan
religion is in many respects a unique phenomenon, there has been a tendency to look for
more familiar Near Eastern parallels and to hail them without inquiring if they really
elucidate the stranger aspects of Cretan material, or to explain away this strangeness in
terms of modern common sense. Later scholarship has also recognized that what is
construed as Minoan religion had certain distinctive features (e.g. Dickinson 1994: 257), of
which several are relevant here. These include the abundance of religious material, lack
of proper temples, popularity of nature sanctuaries, nature-centrism in art and the rarity
of unambiguous depictions of divinities.
To begin with, evidence of religious and ritual activities abounds in the archaeological
record, but, unlike in other complex societies of the eastern Mediterranean, monumental
temples were not built in Crete (Marinatos 1993: 39). Minoan cult places appear in
various forms and, despite certain similarities, comprise a rather heterogeneous group of
extramural and intramural sites (Gesell 1985; Rutkowski 1986; Watrous 1996). Traces of
supposedly religious and ritual activities are found not only in diverse contexts, but also
frequently mixed up with secular activities.
Another conspicuous feature is an association between religious/ritual activities and
natural places. So-called nature sanctuaries, especially peak sanctuaries and sacred caves,

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were salient and even typical Minoan cult places (Rutkowski 1986: 149; Dickinson 1994:
265). Similarities within and between the types of nature sanctuaries are in evidence, but
there are also marked dierences (Jones 1999; Nowicki 2001). Still, received wisdom holds
that they all had the same basic function as places of worship liminal places between the
human and supernatural world whether or not an ideological or political aspect was also
involved (e.g. Rutkowski 1986: 645, 91, 11314; Peateld 1990; Tyree 2001: 40). Minoan
art, in turn, shows rituals performed in a natural setting (Figs. 12) and is distinctive for
its general emphasis on the depiction of the natural world, which is underlined by the
absence of clear ruler iconography and historical narratives. Nature sanctuaries and
nature scenes have been considered to indicate that (a goddess of) nature played a major
role in the Minoan belief system (e.g. Immerwahr 1990: 46; Marinatos 1993: 14951).
Unambiguous depictions of divinities are scarce in Minoan art. Gods and goddesses
have been identied, but the postulated depictions of divinities do not seem to stand out
from humans in any systematic and denable manner (Wedde 1995: 4934). Such motifs
as ying anthropomorphic gures (Fig. 2) may seem to be obvious divinities (because
humans cannot y), but even these may well depict, for instance, hallucinations of ying
humans (cf. Morris 2004) or signify the constellations of Orion and Corona Borealis
(Kyriakidis 2005: 1502). Minoan cult statues are also conspicuous by their absence, or at
least rarity, although some of the larger and ner gures, such as the faience goddesses
from Knossos (Evans 1921: 5001) and the chryselephantine young god from Palaikastro
(MacGillivray et al. 2000), are commonly interpreted as cult statues. The rarity of such

Figure 2 The scene on the Isopata ring shows ritual dancing in a natural setting with a small oating
gure (drawn by V.-P. Herva after Platon and Pini 1984: no. 51).

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objects has been understood to indicate that Minoan cult statues were either mainly
aniconic, made of perishable material, and/or the epiphany of the divinity was central to
Minoan religion (e.g. Marinatos and Hagg 1983; Warren 1990; Sakellarakis and
Sakellarakis 1997: 5309).
None of the features discussed above is perhaps striking when considered in isolation
and each can easily be explained away. Whether or not this is acceptable can be debated,
but it is noteworthy that the proposed explanations for the distinctive features of Minoan
religion are sometimes very supercial. If, for example, nature-centrism points to the
postulated goddess of nature, the question still remains why she (or the natural world)
assumed such a central position in the Minoan mindscape.

De-centring divinities
That Minoan religion included animistic and shamanic aspects is commonly recognized
(e.g. Kopaka 2001: 17; Tyree 2001: 43). But, whereas hypothetical divinities are frequently
woven into interpretations of specic sites and artefacts (e.g. Watrous 1996: 8196),
references to animism and shamanism usually remain a generic way of saying that the
Minoans had beliefs about spirits and performed ecstatic rituals (but see Morris 2004).
This asymmetry is curious, given the problems of identifying Minoan divinities and linking
them to specic cult places (e.g. Peateld 2001), but explained by the strong theistic
underpinnings in the study of Minoan religion. If you assume that religion is primarily
about gods, then you are forced to go looking for them (Peateld 2001: 54). The
ecological perspective advocated in this paper provides a dierent view, as the following
consideration of Minoan stone and tree rituals indicates.
Minoan seal-images depict human gures engaged in odd activities with sacred stone
boulders and trees (Fig. 1), and a few possible sacred stones (often referred to as baetyls)
have been reported from Minoan sites (Warren 1990: 2025). Stalagmites and stalactites
also received special attention, and pieces of them have been found in Minoan houses and
sanctuaries (Rutkowski 1986: 502). That trees and baetyls were central to Aegean
Bronze Age religion was rst proposed by Evans (1901), who argued that trees and stones
were, in some occasions, possessed by the divinity and thus worshipped as aniconic
representations of deities. While the exact nature of tree and stone rituals is debated,
Evanss general idea has been widely accepted. That is, stone and tree rituals are
commonly understood as summoning of or communication with divinities, and the stones
and trees involved in them as either objects of worship in themselves, aniconic cult statues,
or symbols of the places where divinities appeared (e.g. Nilsson 1950: 26288; Marinatos
1989: 142; Warren 1990: 1967, 202; Wedde 1995: 498). In this view, stones and trees
simply referred to something beyond themselves or were temporarily possessed by a power
external to them, but, in essence, they were just inanimate objects categorically distinct
from sentient human subjects.
The ecological perspective holds that the identity of any given entity in a humanenvironment system depends on its developmental history. Thus, non-human constituents
of the environment can, as relationally constituted entities, develop qualities that are not
reducible to their molecular constitution. Objects accumulate life-force as a consequence

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of their long involvement in the social world, and artefacts, plants, animals and other
things can acquire a special status as social beings (e.g. Gell 1998: 2256). Due to
prolonged social relations, even apparently inanimate things can ultimately grow into nonhuman persons or person-like beings (Ingold 2000: 908; Harvey 2005: 99114). Such nonhuman persons can express their presence by diverse means, and their existence is therefore
not a matter of metaphysical contemplation; rather, people encounter and engage with
non-human persons in various ways and contexts in their everyday life (Bird-David 1999:
745; Harvey 2005: 1227).
In this light, Minoan stone and tree rituals need not involve divine beings at all, but
can be understood as interaction between people and specic landscape elements, which
were sentient beings, and with which people engaged in a social manner. Moreover, there
is no reason to believe that non-human persons were categorically distinct from humans or
regarded as supernatural beings deriving their life and agency from some non-human
world. Non-human persons in this sense have very little to do with divinities as
conventionally portrayed in Minoan archaeology (e.g. Rutkowski 1986: 108, 143;
Marinatos 1993: 14774; Crowley 1995: 475) as other-worldly beings, which were above
humans in hierarchy and in control of the human and natural world. Rather, the world
was inhabited by manifold beings with manifold qualities; some entities were simply closer
to humans in form and behaviour than others. To conceptualize the interaction between
human and non-human persons as worship is to misrepresent the potential complexity of
relationships between them.

From religion to ecology

The ecological perspective proposes that social relations between humans and non-human
constituents of the environment are better understood in terms of ecology than of religion,
that is, a mode of knowing and relating with the world. Touching a stone in the manner
depicted in Minoan art, for instance, manipulates not merely meanings or mental images
of the stone, but the stone itself as a material thing. This is because all entities are
relationally constituted, and their identity can therefore be altered by manipulating the
relationships they are endowed with. To engage with a stone is to contribute to its
development into a social being and not to engage denies the social status of the stone. If
social relations with the stone are discontinued, it literally dies despite its continuing
physical integrity (cf. Jarvilehto 1994: 1912). The existence of the stone does not depend
on whether or not people engage with it socially because a myriad of other and in some
respects more powerful relationships also dene the stone.
This approach has also broader implications for our understanding of life in Minoan
Crete. Most obviously, perhaps, the nature of so-called nature sanctuaries is called into
question, as depositing practices at nature sanctuaries can be regarded as the maintenance
of relationships with places that were living, person-like entities with their own powers and
agency (see also Bruck 1999: 32836; Day and Wilson 2002; Herva 2005). In other words,
and in contrast to the conventional views, nature sanctuaries or other cult places need
not have been connected with the worship of other-worldly beings in any meaningful sense
or directly linked with the manipulation of (power) relations in (human) society.

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This formulation, of course, is not a description of the function or meaning of nature

sanctuaries, but merely seeks to open up new perspectives for considering the signicance
of places in Minoan Crete. The point is that all places had a potential to develop into
non-human persons with which people maintained more or less social and intimate
relationships. Places, as Harvey puts it, are not only environments and ecologies but
persons, individuals, agents, active and relational beings, participants in the wider ecology
of life (2005: 109). The relatedness between people and specic places could, of course, be
recognized, expressed and maintained in dierent ways and to various degrees. It seems
plausible, for instance, that places such as Knossos developed a distinctive personality and
a host of special properties due to its extraordinarily long and complex developmental
history (see Day and Wilson 2002; Herva 2005: 2235).
In sum, supposedly religious and ritual activities can mediate human-environment
relations just as directly and eciently as, say, clearing forests for elds. Such activities are
driven not by unsubstantiated beliefs or ideological and political agendas but practical
environmental knowledge, which is of a dierent kind from scientic knowledge.
Modernist epistemology assumes, to use Bird-Davids example, that in order to know
what a tree is like, it must be cut into parts, but knowledge about a tree can also be
acquired through bodily engagement with it and perceptual attentiveness to the changes a
given activity causes in oneself and the tree; this is what Bird-David calls talking with
trees (1999: 77). Minoan tree and stone rituals, for instance, are about knowing and
relating with trees and stones as relationally constituted entities parts of the lived-in
world rather than lumps of packed molecules.
In the ecological perspective, then, the abundance of religious and ritual material
from Bronze Age Crete and the stranger aspects of Minoan religion indicate that the
everyday world in Bronze Age Crete was richly structured, inhabited by manifold social
beings, and full of marvels to be discovered (see also Herva in press). It appears, in other
words, that the importance of divinities has been over-estimated at the expense of what
might be called the animistic aspect of life in Minoan Crete (also cf. Goodison and
Morris 1998). Animism, however, should be understood as a shorthand term for sociality
(i.e. two-way relatedness) between humans and the non-human environment, as described
above; it is a way of perceiving and living with the environment rather than a system of
beliefs or a misconceived worldview (Bird-David 1999; Harvey 2005). A virtue of this
model is that it provides at least a partial explanation as to why the natural world
features in such a prominent manner in Minoan art and religion, as well as accounting
for the rarity of clear depictions of divinities.

Environment and culture in Minoan Crete

Even the most supercial consideration of the factors involved in the development of the
distinctive features of Minoan religion is obviously beyond the present paper, but the
potential signicance of the dramatic Cretan landscape is worth noticing at a general level.
Due to numerous factors from tectonics to the insularity of Crete, certain peculiar features
and strong contrasts are typical of the Cretan landscape. For instance, there are hundreds
of gorges with an individual character, thousands of caves and karst formations, and rich

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and distinctive ora (Rackham and Moody 1996: esp. 1232, 5373). More poetically,
Crete is a land of hollow boulders and hollow clis, of mountains cracked across like
pebbles, of bizarre plants known nowhere else, of tremendous birds, haunted by the ghosts
of surrealist beasts; nothing is quite what it seems (Rackham and Moody 1996: xi).
Perhaps this strange landscape invited people to explore the richness, contrasts and
peculiar features of the surrounding world, which in turn led to special relationships with
various landscape elements. Altered states of consciousness may further have enriched the
experience of the world and contributed to the discovery of the extraordinary qualities of
non-human entities (cf. Ingold 2000: 1002; Morris 2004).
This proposal does not imply that the environment determined cultural features in
some linear manner, but it recognizes that manifold environmental factors contributed to
the development of local human-environment systems. There is no reason to assume that
the physical environment, as a heterogeneous set of developmental resources, inuenced
directly only some aspects of human life (e.g. foodways) but not others (e.g. art). Thus,
categorical assumptions about what the environment can and cannot do are probably
unwarranted (cf. Oyama et al. 2001b: 23). The question is through which specic
mechanisms the environment inuences human life in specic contexts.
Nonetheless, it tends to be assumed that certain types of sites derived their signicance
from some general principles installed in the Minoan mind. Thus, for instance, summits of
hills and mountains were appropriate locations for peak sanctuaries because of beliefs
associated with high places (e.g. Watrous 1996: 77). Alternatively, or in addition, the
location of peak sanctuaries was determined by socio-political factors such as intervisibility between sites and distance from settlements (e.g. Watrous 1996: 80; Soetens et al.
2002). Notwithstanding, it still remains unclear why certain specic peaks were chosen.
Even less clear is why nature sanctuaries other than typical peak and cave sanctuaries
were located where they were. For example, there seems to be nothing special,
topographically, about the location of the sacred enclosure at Kato Syme (Lembessi
and Muhly 1990; Rackham and Moody 1996: 179). The Syme sanctuary is associated with
a spring, however, and, in addition to springs, ritual deposits are sometimes associated
with pools of water, stalagmites/stalactites and ssures on rock (Rutkowski 1986: 502;
Peateld 1992).
The point, rst, is that it is by no means obvious which features of the environment
attracted attention in Minoan Crete and were important to the development of special
identity of certain landscape elements. Evans (2003: 4572; cf. also Gibson 1986: 258, 51
8), for example, speculates that textures of the landscape are central to the perception and
signication of places, and Hagerhall et al. (2004) argue that the fractal dimension of
landscape silhouette aects the appreciation of specic landscapes. A second point is that,
in order to appreciate the signicance of specic landscape elements, they must be
regarded as individuals with their own identities, rather than representatives of types and
categories. If a nature sanctuary site, for instance, was a non-human person, it was that
not because of some pre-existing concept in the mind (cf. Bird-David 1999: 73), but
because of its specic developmental history. There are certainly similarities within and
between nature sanctuaries, but similarities in form at some phase of developmental
history do not necessarily imply similar courses of development (cf. Oyama 2000). The
challenge, ultimately, is to understand those processes of development.

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Conclusions
I have argued in this paper that some religious and ritual activities in Minoan Crete are
better understood as practical and ecient ways of engaging with the non-human
environment, which was inhabited by manifold beings with dierent developmental
histories. This is not to deny that some activities identied as religious and ritual were
primarily about the worship of divinities or reproduction of social identities. However,
especially the theistic aspect of Minoan religion would seem to have been overemphasized at the expense of the animistic aspect, which here refers not to a belief system
but a way of perceiving and living with the environment.
This view proposes that mutuality and a degree of intimacy characterized the
relationship between people and various constituents of the non-human environment in
Bronze Age Crete. As a result of prolonged involvement in the social world, certain
landscape elements developed into persons or person-like beings, and people maintained
relationships with them that are broadly comparable to the relationships between human
subjects. Potentially, then, the Minoans were ower lovers after all. The ecological
perspective advocated in this paper does not, however, represent a retreat to the romantic
vision of the Minoans, but seeks to correct modernist biases inherent in much of the
present understanding of human-environment relations in prehistory. The ecological
perspective, with its emphasis on relationality and development, promises to open up new
insights into life in Minoan Crete, including such unobvious areas as religion.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Carole Gillis, Antti Lahelma, Mika Lavento, Teemu Mokkonen, Jukka-Pekka
Ruuskanen{, Oula Seitsonen, Eeva-Maria Viitanen and the World Archaeology referees for
comments and help with this paper.

Laboratory of Archaeology, PO Box 1000, FIN-90014, University of Oulu, Finland

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Vesa-Pekka Herva has recently completed a PhD in archaeology at the University of Oulu,
Finland. His research interests include the Bronze Age Aegean, human-environment
relations, prehistoric art and historical archaeology.