Understanding the way that older people cope with dementia has important implications for the enhancement of the psychological well-being and quality of life of this group of people. This qualitative study explored how older people cope with dementia, by engaging 12 people with early-stage dementia in semi-structured interviews. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used to identify the shared themes in participants' accounts. Three major themes emerged: "managing identity in relation to dementia", "making sense of dementia", and "coping strategies and mechanisms" (the latter theme divided into "everyday, individual strategies", "coping in relation to others", and "personal attitude/approach"). There were also two additional themes in relation to process issues: issues of "conflict and control" which were evident across all other themes, as was individuality and the importance of "context" in coping with dementia. These findings are discussed in the relation to previous research in this field, and suggestions for further research and clinical practice are outlined.

In this article, I explore political developments on Crete in the Final and Postpalatial periods (the ceramic phases Late Minoan II to IIIB) through the evidence of high status mortuary practices. Patterns in tomb architecture, burial assemblages, and cemetery distributions provide insights into various changes in elite ideologies and in the island's political geography. In analyzing political dynamics, I consider agendas that operated on the intra-island level, to balance the frequent tendency to focus on external (mainland) agency in explaining the cultural and political transformations that occurred on Crete during this period. *This article sets out the principal results of my doctoral research, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board and, for the final year, the British School at Athens. My Ph.D. was supervised by Cyprian Broodbank and Todd Whitelaw, to both of whom I am extremely grateful for their advice and unstinting support. I wish also to acknowledge the staff and my fellow students generally at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, where most of my research was undertaken, for providing such a stimulating working environment. For comments upon drafts of the present paper, I would like to thank Cyprian Broodbank, Todd Whitelaw, John Bennet, Jerry Rutter, Nicola Cucuzza, Elisabetta Borgna, and an anonymous referee for the AJA; I would also like to thank Eleni Hatzki for useful discussion and advice, particularly regarding the dating of the Knossian tombs.

This article explores expressions of cultural identity in the LM II mortuary data from the Knossos valley, in the context of the issue of a ‘Mycenaean’ presence there. It proposes that the burial record is less useful for trying to establish a mainland origin for the people interred in the tombs, than for exploring how people chose to represent themselves and each other in death. In this light, the cultural influences in the tomb architecture and assemblages of the Isopata and Kephala tombs in particular are examined. The experimentation apparent in such tombs suggests that the mortuary sphere was employed as a forum for status display in the context of a social transition at Knossos, with mainland traits being one element in a range of options that were selectively taken up and adapted.

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