When Malcolm Wiener stated in his article that “jewelry above all is subject to the dictates of style and to the Versailles effect” (Wiener 1984, 24), he referred to the “Versailles effect” as an effect “most likely to occur where the cultural prestige of one society within an interconnecting set of societies is great” (Wiener 1984, 17). He pointed out that besides pottery ‒ frequently used for tracing movements of goods or even groups of people ‒ jewelry too has a high potential to illustrate intercultural patterns of commercial, political or ideological exchange. In doing so the “Versailles effect” does not implicate the simple imitation of the material culture of another, (dominant) culture by force or political /military domination, but rather describes a voluntary adaption to this culture, mostly expressed through art forms as well as pottery styles, architectural features or even technological inventions (Wiener 2016, 1-2). In this paper the focus will be laid on a quite similar effect here called the “Knossos effect”, made visible by an examination of distribution patterns of golden signets and their chronology. The term is a reference to Wiener’s term and is used here to describe a similar phenomenon “spreading” from the palace of Knossos in LM IA Crete.