Wandering in the Labyrinth - Enhancing the Accessibility to the Minoan Past Through a Visitor-Sourced Approach

Arising on the island of Crete around 2700 BC, the Minoans are traditionally regarded as the first advanced civilization on the European continent in its modern meaning. The safeguarding of this primordial heritage faces multiple challenges. Besides extrinsic natural and anthropic threats, Minoan remains are also jeopardized by some of their own intrinsic properties. This paper aims to address two of these hazards: first, the preservation state of Minoan sites, leading to their restricted comprehension; secondly, their complex, “labyrinthine”, architecture, further limiting this intelligibility but also challenging the physical access to the remains. The on-going research presented here intends to instrumentalize pathways as a solution to these drawbacks: it seeks to demonstrate that paths can not only be used as mobility vectors to guide and control visitors’ movement but also, when context-aware, as interpretation media to improve on-site experience. Drawing upon phenomenological theories, this paper focusses in particular on the integration of the visitors’ interaction with their surrounding as an innovative approach in the design of such well-informed paths. Based on the outcome of an original experiment conducted among 73 participants on the archaeological site of Malia, this study explores the possibilities of a combined qualitative and quantitative analysis of the visitors’ movement in informing recommendations to increase the visitors’ understanding and orientation abilities on site. The visitors-based approach discussed in this paper is only but one of the three axes to be combined in the general workflow advocated for the formalization of curated visitors’ paths on Minoan archaeological sites.