Overview

Late Bronze Age tombs in Greece and their attendant mortuary practices have been a topic of scholarly debate for over a century, dominated by the idea of a monolithic culture with the same developmental trajectories throughout the region. This book contributes to that body of scholarship by exploring both the level of variety and of similarity that we see in the practices at each site and thereby highlights the differences between communities that otherwise look very similar. The introduction of wealthy burials in the transition from the Middle Helladic period and the building of elaborate tombs during the Late Bronze Age underscores a long-acknowledged change in cultural importance of burials and their locations for contemporary society. Initially archaeologists were interested in these tombs because of the impressive finds that were discovered in them, but as the body of literature on mortuary rituals has grown more recently these tombs have been utilized as lenses through which we can study the related society in novel ways. By bringing together an international group of scholars working on tombs and cemeteries on mainland Greece, Crete, and in the Dodecanese we are afforded a unique view of the development and diversity of these communities. The papers provide a penetrative analysis of the related issues by discussing tombs connected with sites ranging in size from palaces to towns to villages and in date from the start to the end of the Late Bronze Age. Death in Late Bronze Age Greece contextualizes the mortuary studies in recent debates on diversity at the main palatial and secondary sites and between the economic and political strategies and practices throughout Greece. The papers in the volume illustrate the pervasive connection between the mortuary sphere and society through the creation and expression of cultural narratives, and draw attention to the social tensions played out in the mortuary arena.

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9780190926069

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Murphy has assembled 14 chapters of uniformly high quality demonstrating well the considerable diversity of Aegean communities' attitude towards death and the afterlife during Late Bronze age ... This volume will therefore have a lasting value, not just for the representativeness of these variations as well as regular and recurrent form of burial rites, but also for the high number of ground-breaking chapters on unpublished data. It deserves the attention of all those interested in issues in mortuary archaeology. * Laura Alvarez, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Journal of Greek Archaeology *

Author Information

Dr Murphy holds degrees from the University of Cincinnati (Ph.D.), and University College Dublin, and studies Greek archaeology, archaeological methods and theory, the archaeology of religion, and the archaeology of mortuary systems. She is Director of the Kea Archaeological Research Survey that examines the value of pedestrian survey as an archaeological method.

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