In this concluding paper of this series devoted to reporting on the Knossos Urban Landscape Project (KULP), we emphasise what we are learning from the project about specific transformations in the history of the site, and highlight various challenges to previous understandings that are emerging from our data, considered in conjunction with information from previous explorations at the site, which we are still exploring as study and analysis continues.

Building on and complementing over a century of intensive excavation at the site, the Knossos Urban Landscape Project is enabling us to fill in and refine our understanding of the developmental history of a major Aegean centre. Because the ceramics of Knossos across all periods of its occupation have been analysed and documented in detail, this provides an opportunity to develop a fine-grained analysis of long-term urban history, spanning nearly eight millennia and two cycles of urbanisation and state formation and collapse. We have linked the analysis of our new survey data with restudy of the retained material from the rescue excavations conducted by the British School in the valley, and the published results of major excavations, for an integrated synthesis of the history of the site.

This project has produced surprising and indeed challenging information affecting every period of occupation of what has been considered to be a very well-understood site. These challenges are touched on here, and are considered in more detail in the specialist papers presented in this conference session and also published in this volume.