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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2013
Recent discussions on the politics of Minoan Crete concentrate on the relations between the ‘first-order centres’, ‘central places’ or ‘palaces’ and their function within the wider social landscape. The arguments have been based on the proliferation of signet rings and their iconography (Schoep (1999) 213–21), on pottery evidence, i.e. storage capacity (Christakis (1999)) and petrological composition (Day and Wilson (1994); (1998); (2002); Knappett (1999); Knappett and Schoep (2000)), as well as on other iconographical and administrative evidence (Palmer (1995); Knappett and Schoep (2000)). The evidence regarding administration is perhaps the most reliable, since it is within administrations that the relations between centres are crystalised.
Ruth Palmer (1995) and Ilse Schoep (1999) have made important contributions in this area. The former presented much of the evidence on the variation between the various sites, whereas the latter elaborated on that information and argued that the various administrations on Crete are independent of one another and therefore also independent of the Knossian hegemony.