Skotino cave A more comprehensive exploration was carried out by French and Greek archaeologists in the 1960s. They found a considerable number of bronze and ceramic votive offerings, the oldest of them dating from the earliest Minoan periods, suggesting the cave was an important sacred shrine dedicated to a female fertility deity, presumably Britomartis. The cave was still used in Classical Greek and Roman eras, when the fertility goddess Artemis or her Roman equivalent Diana replaced the Minoan deity. Skotino cave The Skotino cave () is one of the largest and more impressive caves among the many caves found in Crete. The
Artemis who Artemis turns into a stag for a transgression and who is then killed by hunting dogs. Usually, the dogs are his own, who no longer recognize their master. Sometimes they are Artemis' hounds. According to the standard modern text on the work, Lamar Ronald Lacey's "The Myth of Aktaion: Literary and Iconographic Studies", the most likely original version of the myth is that Actaeon was the hunting companion of the goddess who, seeing her naked in her sacred spring, attempts to force himself on her. For this hubris, he is turned into a stag and devoured by his own