Staging Death. Funerary Performance, Architecture and Landscape in the Aegean

Edited by Anastasia Dakouri-Hild & Michael J. Boyd

City: Berlin/Boston

Year: 2016

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Description: Hardback, 399 p., b/w tables, b/w and some colour figures, 17.5 x 24.6 cm

Abstract

Places are social, lived, ideational landscapes constructed by people as they inhabit their natural and built environment. An ‘archaeology of place’ attempts to move beyond the understanding of the landscape as inert background or static fossil of human behaviour. From a specifically mortuary perspective, this approach entails a focus on the inherently mutable, transient and performative qualities of ‘deathscapes’: how they are remembered, obliterated, forgotten, reworked, or revisited over time.

Despite latent interest in this line of enquiry, few studies have explored the topic explicitly in Aegean archaeology. This book aims to identify ways in which to think about the deathscape as a cross between landscapes, tombs, bodies, and identities, supplementing and expanding upon well explored themes in the field (e.g. tombs as vehicles for the legitimization of power; funerary landscapes as arenas of social and political competition). The volume recasts a wealth of knowledge about Aegean mortuary cultures against a theoretical background, bringing the field up to date with recent developments in the archaeology of place.

Contents

Staging Death: an Introduction [1-9]
Michael J. Boyd & Anastasia Dakouri-Hild

Getting to Funerary Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Death and Performance in the Prehistoric Aegean [11-30]
Anastasia Dakouri-Hild
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Funerary Ritual-Architectural Events in the Temple Tomb and the Royal Tomb at Knossos [33-55]
Maria Chountasi

Fields of Action in Mycenaean Funerary Practices [57-87]
Michael J. Boyd

Politics of Death at Mitrou: Two Prepalatial Elite Tombs in a Landscape of Power [89-113]
Aleydis Van de Moortel
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Intra, Extra, Inferus and Supra Mural Burials of the Middle Helladic Period: Spatial Diversity in Practice [117-138]
Kalliope Sarri

The Practice of Funerary Destruction in the Southwest Peloponnese [139-154]
Kate Harrell

A Roof for the Dead: Tomb Design and the ‘Domestication of Death’ in Mycenaean Funerary Architecture [155-177]
Yannis Galanakis

Revisiting the Tomb: Mortuary Practices in Habitation Areas in the Transition to the Late Bronze Age at Kirrha, Phocis [181-205]
Anna Lagia, Ioanna Moutafi, Raphaël Orgeolet, Despoina Skorda & Julien Zurbach

Mortuary Practices in the Middle Bronze Age at Kouphovouno: Vernacular Dimensions of the Mortuary Ritual [207-225]
Bill Cavanagh, Anna Lagia and †Chris Mee

‘Death Is Not the End’: Tracing the Manipulation of Bodies and Other Materials in the Early and Middle Minoan Cemetery at Sissi [227-250]
Ilse Schoep & Peter Tomkins

A Posthumanocentric Approach to Funerary Ritual and its Sociohistorical Significance: the Early and Middle Bronze Age Tholos Tombs at Apesokari, Crete [253-273]
Giorgos Vavouranakis

From Performing Death to Venerating the Ancestors at Lebena Yerokambos, Crete [275-295]
Emily Miller Bonney

Aegean Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Burials in the Ruins of Rulers’ Dwellings: a Legitimisation of Power? [297-314]
Angélique Labrude

Continuities and Discontinuities in Helladic Burial Customs During the Bronze Age [317-333]
Oliver Dickinson

Structuring Space, Performing Rituals, Creating Memories: Towards a Cognitive Map of Early Mycenaean Funerary Behaviour [335-360]
Nikolas Papadimitriou

Pollution and Purity in the Argolid and Corinthia During the Early Iron Age: the Burials [361-388]
Sam Farnham

BIOS [389-393]

Index [395-399]