Devolder in Letesson and Knappett forthcoming DRAFT INTRO 1 ARCHITECTURAL ENERGETICS AND LATE BRONZE AGE CRETAN ARCHITECTURE MEASURING THE SCALE OF MINOAN BUILDING PROJECTS Maud Devolder Humboldt Research Fellow Excellence cluster Topoi – Freie Universität Berlin Issues such as the assessment of the scale of Minoan building projects, their impact on the communities, or the role of the labour-time generated by the construction of various masonries on the choices made by the builders often seem too far-fetched to be tackled by archaeologists. By taking a materialistic stance, the present paper offers to explore some of the parameters at play in the production of Minoan architecture. Architectural energetics Architectural energetics is a method that translates a building into the labour-time necessary for its construction, a value expressed in person-days or person-hours (abbreviated p-d and p-h). Such estimation is based on standard units of time necessary to accomplish each task making up the architectural project: the procurement of raw materials, their transport, manufacture and assembling. These are most generally expressed into volumes per hour per person, and referred to as ‘standard costs’, which are applied to the volumes of edifices and thus determine the labour-time necessary for their construction. First assessments of the duration and manpower of ancient building projects mainly appeared in the form of subjective labour-time estimates triggered by romantic views of the grandeur of early civilisations (Andrews 1877; Humboldt 1816; Squier and Davis 1848; Stephens 1841; Webster 1997: 219). Around the middle of the 20 th century, a growing body of publications started to make use of such estimates in order to correlate the magnitude of building or agricultural projects with particular stages of socio-political organization (Adams 1975; Cook 1947; Cottrell 1955; Erasmus 1965; Heizer 1960; 1966; Kaplan 1963; White 1949; 1959). Among the most prominent figures of this early trend was Ch. Erasmus, who led a series of experiments that aimed at providing objective quantification of the building costs (Erasmus 1965). From the seventies onwards, largely benefitting from and participating to a renewed research agenda promoting the building of scientific methods of data recovery and interpretation of the archaeological record, quantitative assessments of architectural projects flourished (Aaberg and Bonsignore 1975; Arnold and Ford 1980; Carmean 1991; Cheek 1986; Craig et alii 1998; Hard et alii 1999; Price 1982; Trigger 1990; Webster 1985; Webster and Kirker 1995). Diverse applications of the method were proposed, which explored the relationship between energy and social complexity, among which E. Abrams offered the most systematic application of architectural energetics to a building project (Abrams 1984a; Abrams 1984b; Abrams 1987; Abrams 1989; Abrams 1994; Abrams 1995; Abrams and Bolland 1999; for an agricultural program, see Arco and Abrams 2006). By objectively assessing the labour-time invested in Mayan architecture, he measured the extent of labour control exerted by the different members of the population, and their capacity to organize it. As was the case with earlier approaches, Abrams examined the relationship between architecture and socio-political development, but he challenged the direct correlation between the two as he wished to envision the broader cultural context in which a compromise between various needs and costs took place (Abrams 1989: 50-51). It is now 30 years since he coined the term ‘architectural energetics’ (Abrams 1984a), and his applications have been extensively emulated by archaeologists working in diverse fields, both chronologically and geographically (for the broad Mediterranean, see for example Brysbaert 2013; 2015; DeLaine 1997;