379 Construction of Identities and the Limits of Minoanized Areas of the Aegean Chapter 34 Potsherds from the Edge: the Construction of Identities and the Limits of Minoanized Areas of the Aegean 1987; 1990a; Sotirakopoulou 1990; 1999; Knappet & Nikolakopoulou 2005, 175–9; Nikolakopoulou et al. this volume, Chapter 32) we are now in a position to begin to examine comparatively the evolution of material culture on Thera, Keos, and Melos (for initial atempts to do this, cf. Davis & Cherry 1990; Berg 2004; Nikolakopoulou et al. this volume, Chapter 32). But that is not the goal of this paper. Instead, we suggest that a diferent sort of comparative exercise may be useful in making headway in understanding the factors that were promoting, at the time of the Minoan New Palaces, the adoption in the Aegean of cultural ‘fashions’ that were characteristically Cretan — the process of culture change that has so oten been called minoanization. 1 In our discussion of this phenomenon, we suggest that during the period of the New Palaces a ‘new environment’ (for a similar concept, cf. Melas 1991) typiied by sustained and intensiied intraregional contact and exchange of products and ideas fostered a more globalized seting in which competition between communities or groups within communities (cf. Hamilakis 2002a; Brumiel 1995; Brumiel & Fox 1994) encouraged emulation of Minoan material and non-material culture. We describe two case studies in the discussion that follows. First, we consider an example of change in material culture at Phylakopi in Melos, a setlement that in the early phases of the LBA clearly lay within this ‘new environment’, yet was in close contact with the indigenous cultures of the Greek mainland. We summarize and consider the implications of the results of a stratigraphical and stylistic study of LC I potery from Renfrew’s excavation of Phylakopi, soon to be published in a supplementary volume of the British School at Athens (Davis & Cherry in press). 2 It will be suggested that the changes that occurred in this potery may be best interpreted as a relection of the desires of indigenous Cycladic factions to identify themselves as belonging to this ‘new environment’ in Jack L. Davis & Evi Gorogianni One of the irst papers that Colin Renfrew published, ‘Crete and the Cyclades before Rhadamanthus’ (1964), set parameters for modern discourse on the subject of interaction between Crete and the Aegean islands. In it, several issues concerning the difusion of material culture and languages that were to emerge as principal themes in his own later scholarship were also fore- shadowed (Renfrew 1996; 1997; 1998; 1999a,b). In ‘Rhadamanthus’, Renfrew summarized, among other things, the existing state of scholarly afairs regarding Crete and the Aegean in the later Middle and early Late Bronze Age, and expressed his own views: The single period of Cretan ascendancy in the Aegean which is evident from the archaeological material is the time from about 1550 to 1400 B.C., covered by Sir Arthur Evans’s Knossian phases LM IA and B, per- haps with LM II. Crete — the irst European colonial power — laid the foundations of this ‘empire’ earlier, in the Middle Bronze Age, when Kamares ware was exported to many sites in the Aegean, in Egypt and in the Levant. Classical legends tell of a time when Minos ruled the seas ... (Renfrew 1964, 107–8) It was the later MBA and the early LBA that, he sug- gested, may have been remembered in myth and leg- end as ‘the period of widespread Cretan domination, of which Rhadamanthus and his generals are perhaps a memory’ (Renfrew 1964, 107–8). Since 1964, signiicant new data have accumu- lated. The potential of certain research projects that Renfrew noted, such as Caskey’s excavations at Ayia Irini (Bikaki 1984; Caskey 1962; 1964a; 1966; 1972; 1979; Caskey et al. 1986; Cummer & Schoield 1984; Davis 1986; Georgiou 1986; Overbeck 1989b; Wilson 1999), has been realized, while he himself led the way in organizing additional studies at Phylakopi (Evans & Renfrew 1984; Renfrew 1978a; 1985; Renfrew et al. in press a). With these discoveries and the rich inds recovered from strata excavated beneath the Volcanic Destruction Levels at Akrotiri (Marthari 1984; 1985;