Molluscan Remains as Indirect Proxy for Identifying Disintegrated Mudbricks in Aegean Bronze Age Archaeological Contexts

The highly perishable nature of earthen architecture in the Bronze Age Aegean, where walls were largely built of sundried mudbricks set on a stone socle, has hindered an accurate perception of buildings in this period and region. The recent proliferation of research on mudbricks is slowly recognising their systematic use in construction, but primary evidence is still difficult to collect. Here, we explore the potential of marine shells to generate data for the reconstruction of architecture in the Bronze Age Aegean, especially on Crete. We argue that tiny molluscan shells were inadvertently incorporated along the seagrasses used as vegetal temper in the mudbricks matrix. Seagrasses offer an ideal environment for specific molluscan taxa; the latter are considered by geological and archaeomalacological studies as indirect indicators for marine plants in the fossil and in the archaeological record respectively. Relying on archaeomalacological material from Early and Middle Bronze Age (3rd and early 2nd millennium BCE) contexts in the Minoan settlement at Malia and setting it in perspective against broader ethnographic, historical and archaeological evidence, the aim of this paper is to showcase the potential of specific molluscan taxa to serve as an indirect proxy for identifying the presence of disintegrated mudbrick walls.