The Myth of the Minotaur as a Metaphor for Archaeological Interpretation
Historiographical Advances in Conceptualizing Shipwrecks in 21st-Century Underwater Archaeology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22517/25392662.25870Keywords:
myth of the Minotaur, archaeological contexts, shipwrecks, historiography, underwater archaeologyAbstract
This study seeks to understand how the West, conceived as a social and cultural construct grounded in diverse legacies of antiquity and expanded through processes of colonization and modernization, has shaped the production of archaeological knowledge in recent decades. This cultural system has also generated ways of conceptualizing the identity of material culture through the category of the monstrous, which makes it possible to account for the complexity, hybridity, and heterogeneity of material evidence within the contemporary regime of historicity.
Given that, in the early development of archaeology, the civilizations of the Aegean Sea played a significant role in shaping the discipline, and that certain elements of the classical tradition—particularly the myth of the Minotaur—have been used to analyze material culture, this study employs this myth as an interpretive framework to develop a state-of-the-art overview of maritime and underwater archaeology. Its aim is to identify the theoretical and methodological trends derived from the cultural frameworks through which underwater contexts are currently interpreted.
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