Exploring funerary landscapes is essential to understand cultural and social changes that took place on the Greek Mainland from the Middle Helladic to the Late Helladic period. The shaft graves at Mycenae and the tholos tombs in Messenia have mainly focused attention on the Peloponnese.
In the historic period, ancient Greeks placed great emphasis on the importance of burial of the dead. The άταφοι, or unburied dead, were thought to wander the earth, unable to enter Hades. Some categories of the dead also were viewed as potentially more dangerous to the living, and required special burial or unusual deposition.
The discovery, in 1999, of a large new group of wall paintings from the Mycenaean palace of Tiryns has sparked, almost a century after Rodenwaldt’s seminal publication on its painted decoration, a renewed interest in this group of material.
British School at Athens, Upper House (Souedias 52, Kolonaki, Athens)
In this lecture we present the results of the excavation of the small settlement of Tsoungiza in the Nemea Valley and its changing relationship to the nearby capital of Mycenae during the Late Bronze Age in Greece, roughly from 1700-1200 BCE. The systematic excavations revealed a continuous occupation with significant evidence of the agrarian basis of the community and eventual incorporation into the territory of Mycenae.
The Anavlochos is a 5 km long North-West/South-East crest of limestone extending above the village of Vrachasi (Lasithi, Crete) which was mostly settled from the Late Minoan III to the Proto-archaic period. A settlement, a cemetery and a votive deposit were partly and briefly excavated in 1931 by Pierre Demargne.
The ongoing investigation of the Middle Bronze Age community at Erimi-Laonin tou Porakou revealed a new specific evidence of proto-urbanization in Cyprus. Current evidence suggests that such a process gradually develops through the Middle Bronze Age, without significant external triggers, and culminates in MC III–LC I.
