I asked a question here a few days ago about historical interpretations of certain Greek myths. It wasn't well received, and I was told most of these interpretations are not justified and mostly nonsense, fair enough, I can see how such thoughts can attract lots of unwarranted speculation.
But this made me think of the following questions: there is a plethora of Greek myth that revolves around a great kingdom on the island of Crete ruled by a king named Minos. Today we know from archeological evidence that there was such a civilization in the bronze age, we call them "the Minoans" after the aforementioned mythical king Minos. But how did the Greeks know about the Minoans? I can think of three possibilities:
-Surviving ruins: They knew about some past civilization on Crete through ruins or other evidence, perhaps Minoan ruins were still visible without need for excavation sometimes after the 8th century BC, they weren't that old, and they just made up stories about them, much like we know about the ancient Romans but the movie Gladiator was made up in recent years based on the knowledge we have about the Romans.
-They didn't: The Greeks just told stories about people on Crete, and the fact that they mention people living there doesn't mean these mythical people have anything to do with real people. For some reason Crete itself assumed some importance in myth, and it was populated in myth because people are everywhere and stories are about people. The people in the Greek myth have no relation with the people who actually lived there in the Bronze age, or at least there is no evidence of this, and the name "Minoan" is just a modern association.
-Oral tradition: The Myceneans interacted with the Minoans in the late 2nd millennium BC before their demise, they told stories about them (either completely made up, or with some core of real events that then got exaggerated) and the stories were orally passed down all the way to classical Greece. Greeks in the 5th century BC told stories about a great king on Crete because they were told those stories, but they had no other evidence of the existence of the Minoans. In this sense, at the very least, the existence of the Minoans is something historical that was passed down through myth. In this case it would be conceivable that some other aspect of Minoan culture might have survived in the myth.
To what extent are either of the three solutions correct? Are there other possibilities? The Greeks didn't do archaeology, did they?
Option 2 is correct: they didn't know about them, and there's no reason to imagine they did.
The classical Greeks had legends about mythical kings of lots of places, but they show no knowledge of any Bronze Age culture. Legends about Oedipus don't mean they were aware of the Mycenaean palace culture; legends about Priam don't mean they were aware of Arzawa or the Hittites. Some architectural Bronze Age remains existed, but most of the time we just have to infer that from the fact that they still exist now: classical-era sources show very little interest in them.
Greek myths are set in an invented past, not in the Bronze Age. Take Oedipus' great great grandfather, Cadmus: if we were expecting a historical setting he'd have to be pretty early, right? He's supposed to have been the founder of Thebes. But there's another legend about Cadmus, that he imported the Greek alphabet from the Phoenicians. Except ... the Phoenicians only became significant after the end of the Bronze Age, and the earliest use of the Greek alphabet dates to the 700s BCE. Herodotus refers to seeing tripods with 'Cadmeian writing' (Καδμήϊα γράμματα) in Thebes (5.59), and he estimated Cadmus to have lived 1600 years old before his own time -- yet he was able to read it, which means there's no way it could have been more than about 200 years old at most.
So when people tie Greek myths to the Bronze Age, that's really just buying into the classical Greeks' own invented chronology of the past. We don't assign a historical Cadmus to 2000 BCE on Herodotus' say-so: when he assigns Heracles and a Trojan War to 1300 BCE and 1200 BCE, that's on the same level of reality.
'Minoan' is purely a modern label. It looks like you're aware of this, but it's best to be clear: the term was coined by Arthur Evans around 1900, based on the classical-era legend of Minos, and we don't know what they called themselves.