When the Schulich School of Engineering approached Dr. Caterina Pizanias last year to submit a proposal for a course on the Minoans for their upcoming Summer 2007 Study Abroad Programme on Crete, she was quite excited about the opportunity. While the Minoans' achievements in the arts are well known, Dr. Pizanias thought that their accomplishments as engineers and architects would be particularly interesting for engineering students, and provide an "easy entry" to arts, culture, and history for engineers.

The island of Crete is situated at a crossroads between three continents, a crossroads marking the confluence of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates. Its diverse topography and variegated climate, vegetation, and water availability are the result of its seismic past. Its geographical location made it a favourite home and refuges for many peoples in the distant past. Its seismic past forced same peoples to be imaginative with what nature gave them and over the millennia the legendary "Minoans" left us with an impressive cultural legacy, so much so that they are seen by many as the "first Europeans." There is much that we still do not know about the Minoans, but there is increasingly more and more that we can point to with some certainty.

Archeology, art history, and anthropology have been the traditional disciplines where one went to learn about the Minoans and their cultural achievements. Lately though, research in areas such as civil engineering, water management, geology, biogeography, architecture, ship building and other such technical disciplines have been opening up the scholarship about Minoans. So, pulling together relevant material from above sources, Dr. Pizanias, a Sociologist of Knowledge and Art, designed a cross-disciplinary course that would both appeal to engineering students’ academic interests and enrich their knowledge of technical inventions and discoveries of the ancient world.

The result was By the Way of the Labyrinth: The Minoans as Architects, Engineers and Merchants. The class met on Mondays in a traditional classroom where the "stage was set" through lectures and discussions on site visits that were scheduled for the rest of the week. Every Wednesday the class visited an archeological site or museum in the city of Chania and the surrounding area. The guest speakers were curators, scholars, and professors, all experts in their areas of study. Each Saturday was taken up by visits to sites in other areas of Crete such as in Knossos, and Central and Southern Crete, again led by experts in the areas of our study. On Saturdays and Sundays, after the "formal" lectures and site visits, the students experienced first hand contemporary Crete and its culture. The students wrote field reports, took classroom exams and expanded their knowledge of Minoans through a term paper. But, most importantly, the students were able to experience a culture that spans millennia from Neolithic times to the present, a cultural learning experience that can only take place on magical Crete!

Photo: Students with Dr. Vlazaki, Director of the Archeological Museum in Chania and Co-Curator of the Kastelli Site.

About the Author: Dr. Caterina Pizanias is Director of The ArtExchange, Curator, Writer, and Itinerant Academic.