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Oxbow says: Crete has become a seemingly endless source of new archaeological discoveries in recent years, feeding a burgeoning tourist industry but, six years after the centenary of the archaeological re-discovery of Crete by Evans and his contemporaries, it is pertinent to look back at how the history of Crete's past has been created. This collection of sixteen essays, first given at a workshop held in Venice in 2005, presents a critique of how the Minoan past, our enquiry into it and interpretations of it, have been used and appropriated. This discussion of modernity juxtaposes past and present, highlighting factors, events and political agendas that have influenced the way in which the Minoan past has been written, for example European colonialism and imperialism. The Minoans have been used to create an array of modern identities including European, Mediterranean, Greek and Cretan, with many different parties wanting a piece of it. The contributors address a variety of issues ranging from the historical and intellectual environment in which the rediscovery of Minoan Crete took place to the role of the Minoan past in Freudian psychoanalysis, and from the reception of the Minoans in modern European artistic movements and literary works to tourism, heritage management, and pedagogy. The volume will have a wide appeal, not just within Aegean archaeology, as it adds to a growing body of literature on modernity and archaeology.