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115 Archaeological evidence indicates that the island of Crete in the southern Aegean saw processes of significant social and cultural change at the turn of the second millennium BCE. In the Cretan chronology, this moment stands as the transition between the Early and Middle Minoan periods (EM and MM, especially EM III–MM IA, ca. 2200–1900 BCE), at the end of which the Aegean’s first “palatial” social formations are traditionally understood to have emerged on the island. Evidenced changes in material culture, economic strategies, exchange, and settlement patterns are thus grouped together under the rubric of a palatial transition and thereby linked to the contemporary construction of large monumental architectural complexes at various locations around the island. For the past several decades attempts at defining the impetus behind these changes have constituted one of the principal foci of research in Aegean Bronze Age archaeology, with a range of different theories interpreting it as primarily economic, climatic, or political in nature. As a departure from such previous approaches, I attempt with this chapter to explicitly consider the problem of EM-MM sociocultural change through the lens of a particular object corpus, to see how alterations in the world of objects may be understood not F I V E Reembodying Identity Seals and Seal Impressions as Agents of Social Change on Late Prepalatial Crete Emily S.K. Anderson DOI: 10.5876/9781607321996.c05 116 Emily S.K. Anderson only to have reflected changes in human behavior as passive tools and signifiers but in fact to have participated in and even guided those crucial transformations in action and interaction that we identify with the development of palatial society. My focus is on the earliest stylistic/iconographic group of engraved seal stones represented across the island, known as the “Parading Lions” group (Yule 1980, 208–9; cf. Sbonias 1995, 89–99). This group, dating to the EM III/MM IA period, presents several key developments in glyptic design on Crete that imply fundamental changes not only in how seals and their impressions were understood on the island but also to the manner in which humans interacted with seals and—through seals—with one another. The use of seals has often been considered in terms of its relationship to early writing. In various places the two practices have coincided, as was the case on Bronze Age Crete, where the signs of early scripts were sometimes engraved on seals, and seal impressions and writing were often rendered together on the same objects, such as sealings, nodules, and roundels (see, e.g., Branigan 1969; Hallager 1996; Palaima 1990; Schoep 1999). Seal use and writing can also be seen to coincide in terms of their representational character. Taken in this light, both seal motifs and signs from scripts are understood to have been conventionally associated with particular stable values, with which they could be identified in each instance of their reproduction (whether it be a seal impression, an incised sign, etc.). In turn, a seal impression or written text is approached as a durable means through which a message prepared by an absent human could be “read,” according to certain rules, in another context (potentially distanced over both time and space). This perspective thus posits seal impressions and written texts as material transcriptions of such predetermined messages. In this chapter, I do not wish to challenge the relationship between seal use and writing but to explore a perspective through which both can be complicated by reconsidering the dynamics of their lived material practice and thereby problematizing the primacy of their representational character. Working in a direction similar to Tim Ingold’s (2000) reassessment of writing as an embodied and “continually responsive” “skill” rather than merely a performed “technology ” of regulated representation and transcription, I examine how people experienced interaction with seals and impressions, recognizing each as a distinct material reality embedded in (and often traveling between) particular lived contexts. Thus, I contend that although certain changes observable in the later Prepalatial (EM III­ –MM IA) glyptic corpus crucially altered the semiotic underpinnings of seal use, such developments must be considered with respect to how people actually experienced and valued the involved materials in light of these changes. New emphasis is thereby brought to persons’ direct engagement with and consideration of seals and the impressions rendered with them—that is, to the “present” moments of persons’ experience of the objects instead of only the foregone moments and absent humans thought to be signified by them. [18.223...

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