The earliest settlers of Crete arrived from the east or south, probably from Anatolia (now Turkey).
Their economy was already based on farming, with domesticated animals and cultivated crops, and they spun and wove cloth.
They lived in villages in the open often on low hills as at Knossos and Phaistos, and sometimes for part of the year in caves.
They built simple rectangular houses, at first entirely of sun-dried mud brick and later of mud brick on a stone socle.
Their burial places, frequently in caves or rock shelters, were outside the settlements.
which suggests a relatively advanced culture.
Cave sanctuaries evidently played an important part all through the Neolithic period.
The first settlers at Knossos did not use pottery but this stage was short-lived and Neolithic pottery reached a high standard in dark burnished wares, sometimes with incised decoration of simple geometric patterns filled with white paste.
Other characteristic artefacts were stone and bone tools, bone arrowheads, stone vessels and mace heads.
There are female figurines in both stone and clay, typically modelled with exaggerated buttocks.
Blades made from obsidian (volcanic glass) were of particular interest in that the source of the material was the island of Melos in the Cyclades.
By the end of the fourth millennium BC settlement had spread throughout Crete, and as far as some relatively remote offshore islands.
The Englishman Sir Arthur Evans, excavating the archaeological site at Knossos at the beginning of the last century, was confronted with evidence of a previously unsuspected Bronze Age civilisation.
In the absence of written history for the Aegean Bronze Age he named the civilisation and its people Minoan after King Minos, a legendary ruler of Crete in the distant past according to the 8C BC Greek poet Homer.
Evans devised a tripartite system of relative chronology, the Early Minoan (EM), Middle Minoan (MM) and Late Minoan (LM) periods with each subdivided into three parts (as in EMI EMII and EMIII) and sometimes further refined (LMIA, LMIB) to reflect the evidence of stratigraphy and pottery styles.
This chronological framework for the Bronze Age on Crete became generally accepted and with minor modifications as the archaeological evidence has unfolded, it remains valid today.
More recently the eminent Greek archaeologist Dr N.
Platon proposed a system of chronology based on major events in the time-span of the Minoan palaces lie divided the Bronze Age into four periods: Prepalatial (the approximate equivalent of Evans' Early Minoan), Protopalatial (the period of the Old Palaces), Neopalatial (the period of the New Palaces) and Postpalatial.
The majority of Minoan sites were destroyed at the end of LMI.
However, the Palace of Knossos was re-occupied after that LMIB destruction and there is increasing evidence for use as late as the 13C: so-called postpalatial dates during the final years at Knossos have to be viewed in that context.
These two dating systems are not incompatible and both arc attempts to establish a relative chronology or intelligible sequence within the Bronze Age of Crete.
For an absolute chronology, or calendar dates, archaeologists beginning with Evans painstakingly built up correlations with the world outside Crete, especially Egypt.
using foreign artefacts excavated in a reliable context on the island, and Cretan artefacts similarly found abroad.
Absolute dating of the Egyptian sequence was possible because the civilisation left written records and its hieroglyphic script had been deciphered in 1822.
The scientific method of radiocarbon dating has provided a valuable complementary system for correlation with what are in effect historical dates from Egypt.
Further inter-disciplinary study of increasingly sophisticated scientific evidence continues to lead to revised interpretations in the realm of absolute dates and in the refining of the relative chronology of the Minoan civilisation in relation to the rest of the Aegean world.