In the striking event of death, each community produces rituals, not explicitly or exclusively of a funerary nature. This is done in order to maintain both its stability and integrity, while incorporating the living into a fixed system of culturally defined roles and statuses.
This book is about the relationship between the people and the sea in the prehistoric Aegean. It explores how people understood the sea as an integral part of their way of life and examines the role the sea played in the prehistoric societies of the archipelago. It may at first seem obvious - even selfevident - that there had been a close relationship between people and the sea, since the Aegean Archipelago is the dominant feature of its wider area. It spreads over at total area of about 214,000 sq km. This is a bit less than the overall land area of Greek state today, which is almost 132,000 sq km. This large area of water includes over 1000 islands, many of which are populated today. The Aegean Sea and its islands epitomise Greece in the minds of many people today.
The Greek Bronze Age, roughly 3000 to 1000 BC, witnessed the flourishing of the Minoan and Mycenean civilizations, the earliest expansion of trade in the Aegean and wider Mediterranean Sea, the development of artistic techniques in a variety of media, and the evolution of early Greek religious practices and mythology. The period also witnessed a violent conflict in Asia Minor between warring peoples in the region, a conflict commonly believed to be the historical basis for Homer's Trojan War. The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean provides a detailed survey of these fascinating aspects of the period, and many others, in sixty-six newly commissioned articles.
