The project focuses on the relationship between urbanization and processes of invention/innovation in the material culture of the Bronze Age society of Minoan Crete (3100-1200 BCE).In essence, it first proposes to address issues of settlement growth, layout and elaboration, but also plans to develop a diachronic approach to connections between settlements and to investigate issues of site hierarchies. Methodologically, along with a description of urban infrastructures, the intra-site study will use space syntax, an approach to spatial organization through graph analysis, to highlight characteristics of the selected sites in terms of accessibility, street layout, and density of occupation. At the inter-site level, comparisons will allow the production of a typology of settlement patterns. The project will subsequently adopt a network approach to model and test hypotheses in terms of how settlements related to one another through time and across different scales (local, regional, island-wide).Secondly, the project intends to consider the appearance of technological innovations constituting crucial watersheds in the production of various aspects of Minoan material culture (including architecture, ceramics, glyptic, metalwork, script, etc.) and analyze their spatial distribution. The proportion of technological novelties exhibited in the archaeological data of various types of settlements through the history of their occupation will then be highlighted.Finally, on the basis of the hierarchies of settlements and the demographic processes they implied, a network analysis of scenarios of diffusion of innovations will be conducted and evaluated in terms of their congruity with archaeological data. Through these analyses, the project ultimately aims at exploring to what extent urbanization played a role in the appearance of technological inventions, the spread of innovations, but also the persistence of traditional expressions of material culture of Bronze Age Crete