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Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge Companions Online http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/companions/ The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age Edited by Cynthia W. Shelmerdine Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521814447 Online ISBN: 9781139001892 Hardback ISBN: 9780521814447 Paperback ISBN: 9780521891271 Chapter 13A - Death and the Mycenaeans pp. 327-341 Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521814447.015 Cambridge University Press P1:KAE CUUS226-13 cuus226 ISBN: 978 0 521 89127 1 To p M a r g i n : 0.5in Gutter Margin: 0.875in May 31, 2008 21:16 13: Burial Customs and Religion 13a: Death and the Mycenaeans William Cavanagh S Introduction rom its very beginnings, Aegean archaeology has been haunted by graves: early travelers marveled at the Treasury of Atreus, F nineteenth-century museum collections were enriched from rifled chamber tombs such as those on Rhodes, and Schliemann dazzled his contemporaries with reports of gold from the shaft graves at Mycenae (Ch. 11,pp.258).1 In the twenty-first century ce,this emphasis can seem misplaced: our concern is how people lived during the Bronze Age, not how they were buried. How can the study of burials be justified? Quantity is one justification: whereas the number of excavated settlements can be counted in tens, the number of cemeteries is in hundreds, tombs in thousands, and burials in tens of thousands. Moreover, whereas the more extensively excavated settlements are important palaces, the cemeteries give us a better feel for the smaller provincial centers, towns, and villages where most Mycenaeans lived. (Intensive survey has now also helped rectify that imbalance; Chs. 1,pp.8–10; 12,p.308). Furthermore, although funeral rituals are not everyday occurrences to tell us how people lived their everyday lives, archaeologists hope that the remains from the grave can inform us about important themes: social structure; status and wealth; the sense of community; the presentation of peoples’ identities as male, female, or child or as official, craftsman, villager, or slave; the relation of individuals to their forebears.2 Certainly such hopes may not always be fully realized. The way an individual is portrayed in ceremonies such as funerals can be manipulated by the living to misrepresent their own status and that of the deceased. Bias and misrepresentation can 327 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 165.123.34.86 on Wed Jul 15 15:01:03 BST 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521814447.015 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2015 P1:KAE CUUS226-13 cuus226 ISBN: 978 0 521 89127 1 To p M a r g i n : 0.5in Gutter Margin: 0.875in May 31, 2008 21:16 William Cavanagh mislead our interpretation of grave evidence, as of other archaeological and historical data, but other sources, archaeological and textual, provide a useful corrective. At the same time, there are limits to how much distortion a community will accept, so although this or that case may mislead, the many burials give quantitative ballast to our interpretations. Analysis of human skeletons can throw light on patterns of life expectancy, health and disease, occupational injury, and population genetics.3 In the present chapter, however, the emphasis is on ritual, and not on these further insights (still not widely applied in Aegean archaeology). Tomb and Grave Types The use of two types of tomb is broadly, though not exactly, coter- minous with Mycenaean civilization in both its geographical and its chronological spread. These are the chamber tomb (Fig. 13.1)andthe tholos tomb (round domed tomb; Fig. 13.2).4 The chamber tomb is rock-cut; its dromos (entrance passage) leads underground to the stomion (doorway,marked by jambs and usually walled up with stones), which gives access to the burial chamber(s). The tholos tomb follows a similar plan with a subterranean chamber reached down a passage and through an entrance, but in this case the chamber and entrance are vaulted in dry-stone walling, not simply hewn out of the rock; the passage is also sometimes lined with stone. The origins of these two archetypal Mycenaean tomb types are not certain. Both may owe some- thing to earlier Minoan tombs, but differ from them in design, in details of their construction (for example, the method of corbelled vaulting, with overlapping courses of blocks, used in tholos tombs; Ch. 11), and in the social groups they served.5 On the other hand, tholoi can also be seen as a monumentalized version of the traditional burial mounds of the Middle Bronze Age. Indeed, the two types were the most suc- cessful response to a need that grew up in mainland Greece during the preceding Middle Bronze Age period, for collective (probably family) tombs. Like tumuli (burial mounds), shaft graves, and various types of built tomb, they are designed to be reopened at intervals for succes- sive burials and to allow access for other ceremonies (below). In other words, the power of tradition and the luster of Minoan sophistication contributed to their genesis, but even more important factors were the social and political transformations in early Mycenaean Greece, which 328 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 165.123.34.86 on Wed Jul 15 15:01:03 BST 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521814447.015 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2015 P1:KAE CUUS226-13 cuus226 ISBN: 978 0 521 89127 1 To p M a r g i n : 0.5in Gutter Margin: 0.875in May 31, 2008 21:16 Death and the Mycenaeans figure 13.1. Plan and section of Athenian Agora Tomb 40 (N12:4), LH IIIA1. The tomb contained a mature adult male (C), a young adult male (D), an adult female (A), and an adolescent (B). A massive bronze spear-head (5)was found over the coffin that held (D). S. A. Immerwahr, The Athenian Agora: Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens XIII: The Neolithic and Bronze Ages. Princeton: American School of Classi- cal Studies at Athens 1971,pl.90. c American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Courtesy of the Trustees of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. demanded extravagance and display focused on the funeral (Ch. 10, pp. 242–51). But tholos and chamber tombs are not the only kinds used during the Late Bronze Age. The tumulus or burial mound had a tradition going back 500 years before the Mycenaean period; widespread in MH, the type persisted in some parts of Greece (Ch. 10,p.238). The individual graves within the rubble and earth mound can vary from simple pits to elaborate built structures, but the mound itself served to unite those buried within, and needed to be reexcavated with each new interment (Pl. 13.1).6 Built graves also come in a variety of different designs, sometimes rectangular or oval with a small (false?) entrance in 329 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 165.123.34.86 on Wed Jul 15 15:01:03 BST 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521814447.015 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2015 P1:KAE CUUS226-13 cuus226 ISBN: 978 0 521 89127 1 To p M a r g i n : 0.5in Gutter Margin: 0.875in May 31, 2008 21:16 William Cavanagh a corner or at one end, sometimes of a more irregular plan.7 The shaft grave was also developed to be reopened: the lower “grave,” which housed the skeletons, might be built or simply cut out of the rock, but had ledges and sometimes timbers to support the roof, which was often sealed with impermeable clay. The upper “shaft” would be back-filled with clay and earth. In addition to the multiple tombs, there are also single graves.8 The classic pit-grave was simply excavated out of the ground, whereas the cist grave had its sides lined with slabs or walling and would be covered with slabs, to form a box containing the burial. Pithos (large storage jar) burial, which was popular in the MH period, is surprisingly rare in Mycenaean Greece. This variety of tomb types arose in part from changes in fashion through time, in part from differing cultural traditions in different regions of Greece, and in part from variations in the status of the individuals buried. Tombs and the Community Burial, in the language of French anthropology, is a “collective rep- resentation,” a way in which families and communities express their identities. Although chamber and tholos tombs are widespread and representative, not all Mycenaean communities used them. Indeed, in the early Mycenaean period, chamber tombs, though not uncommon in the Argolid, were rare elsewhere in Greece (Fig. 13.3).9 Even in LH III, at the height of their popularity (Fig. 13.4), they were not widespread in, for example, Messenia (tholos tombs are known at more sites) or in Thessaly. Similarly, with the conspicuous exception of the Treasury of Minyas at Orchomenos, tholos tombs are unknown in Boeotia, and only one has so far been found in the Corinthia. At some sites, factors such as local geology meant that small tombs were built of stone, because soft Tertiary sediments, preferred for chamber tombs, were not available; but frequently the choice was cultural. Thus the community at Eleusis clung to built tombs throughout the Late Bronze Age (whatever the people up the road in Athens did), whereas at Marathon–Vrana the even more old-fashioned tumulus burial was retained by one group (Pl. 13.1), even after a rival family built a brash new tholos tomb just 1 km away. The choice of tomb type conveyed a message: arguably, in the first case the people of Eleusis persistently over hundreds of years asserted tradition over fashion, and did not copy their 330 Downloaded from Cambridge Companions Online by IP 165.123.34.86 on Wed Jul 15 15:01:03 BST 2015.
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