Kinship and social change at the onset ofthe Mycenaean era. The case of Ayios Vasileios

Description

At the onset of the Mycenaean (or Late Helladic, LH) era, the relatively egalitarian and introvert Middle Helladic (MH) village societies of the southern Greek mainland gave way to expansionist Mycenean polities. In the mortuary sphere, these changes were expressed with the introduction of new mortuary practices, with multiple burials in elaborate tombs and formal cemeteries replacing single inhumations in simple intramural graves. These new practices, which become the norm in the Mycenaean period, have been interpreted as bringing about new divisions between age, gender and status groups and the emergence of extended kin groups.
The aim of this paper is to investigate the extent to which kinship relationships, anchored in the traditional MH households, were reconfigured during the transitional Early Mycenaean era, and were given material expression by means of new, often experimental, mortuary choices. Our analysis focuses on the Early Mycenean (ca. 17001500 BC) North Cemetery of Ayios Vasileios in Laconia). The cemetery displays the full range of traditional and new practices, i.e. both single burials as well as multiple interments in larger tombs. In this paper, we will examine the biological affinity among individuals buried together in the same tomb, or cluster of tombs, by using dental and cranial phenotypic variation. The results will be integrated with the contextual evidence of funerary practices and specific osteobiographies in order to explore intra-community distinctions based on kinship, but also between age and gender groups. We will also discuss methodological challenges for kinship analysis in prehistoric Aegean material (e.g. sample size, skeletal preservation), as well as the importance of interdisciplinarity in the analysis of prehistoric funerary assemblages.

Period	31-Aug-2022 → 3-Sept-2022
Event title	European Association of Archaeologists 2022 Meeting: Session Multi-proxy Approaches to Kinship in the Greco-Roman World
Event type	Conference
Location	Budapest, HungaryShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International