Iron Age Crete dif­fered from the rest of Greece in that it did not con­tain in­sti­tu­tions, such as that of pub­lic as­sem­bly, the gym­na­sium, open as­sem­bly tem­ples, the an­dron, etc., which were ubiq­ui­tous out­side Crete. Crete was, how­ever, ac­tively in­ter­act­ing with the rest of Greece and this sit­u­a­tion ap­pears not be the re­sult of lim­ited con­tact. One ex­pla­na­tion is that Crete con­tained a very dif­fer­ent type of so­cial struc­ture dur­ing this pe­riod. The gen­er­a­tion and spread of sev­eral of these com­mon in­sti­tu­tions out­side Crete was due to the strat­egy of ag­gran­diz­ers within ac­tive con­texts such as that of fu­ner­als and in­ter­state ath­letic con­tests. Crete lacked the in­ter­state ath­letic con­text and its fu­neral con­texts were de­cid­edly dif­fer­ent from those else­where, with far less ac­tiv­ity tied to the be­hav­ior of ag­gran­diz­ers. This ob­ser­va­tion sug­gests paths for fu­ture re­search.