Atsipades is a modern village and an archaeological site of a Minoan

Minoan civilization

The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age civilization that arose on the island of Crete and flourished from approximately the 27th century BC to the 15th century BC. It was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century through the work of the British archaeologist Arthur Evans...

 peak sanctuary in western Crete.

Geography

Atsipades is about 20km south of the modern town of Rethymnon. Korakias peak is a part of Mount Kouroupas, above the modern village of Atsipades.

Archaeology

Atsipades was identified as a peak sanctuary in 1986. The site was excavated in 1989 by the Atsipadhes Korakias Peak Sanctuary Project, directed by Alan Peatfield, then Curator of the British School at Athens

British School at Athens

The British School at Athens is one of the 17 Foreign Archaeological Institutes in Athens, Greece.-General information:The School was founded in 1886 as the fourth such institution in Greece...

 branch at Knossos, now at University College Dublin

University College Dublin

University College Dublin ) - formally known as University College Dublin - National University of Ireland, Dublin is the Republic of Ireland's largest, and Ireland's second largest, university, with over 1,300 faculty and 17,000 students...

 Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

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Atsipades was in use from Early Minoan III

Minoan pottery

Minoan pottery is more than a useful tool for dating the mute Minoan civilization. Its restless sequence of rapidly maturing artistic styles reveal something of Minoan patrons' pleasure in novelty while they assist archaeologists to assign relative dates to the strata of their sites...

 to Middle Minoan II.

Finds included ceramic spindle

Spindle (textiles)

A spindle is a wooden spike used for spinning wool, flax, hemp, cotton, and other fibres into thread. It is commonly weighted at either the bottom middle or top, most commonly by a circular or spherical object called a whorl, and may also have a hook, groove or notch, though spindles without...

 whorls for weaving

Weaving

Weaving is a method of fabric production in which two distinct sets of yarns or threads are interlaced at right angles to form a fabric or cloth. The other methods are knitting, lace making and felting. The longitudinal threads are called the warp and the lateral threads are the weft or filling...

, numerous clay human and animal figurines

Figurines

Figurines is an indie rock band from Denmark, formed in the mid-1990s. The band released their first EP, The Detour, in 2001 and their first full-length album, Shake a Mountain, in 2004. The band began to receive national attention in Denmark around the time of the full-length release, and began...

, ceramic lamps and ceramic altars (a group of finds originally suggested to depict circumcised human phalloi has since been recognised to represent sleeved human arms).

The votive animal figurines are mostly of cattle. Settlements found by an archaeological field survey

Archaeological field survey

Archaeological field survey is the method by which archaeologists search for archaeological sites and collect information about the location, distribution and organization of past human cultures across a large area...

 in the nearby Ayios Vasilios Valley suggest that this peak sanctuary served a rural community of farmsteads and hamlets

Hamlets

Hamlets is the name of an open source system for generating web-pages originally developed by René Pawlitzek at IBM...

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