A survey of Late Bronze Age funerary archaeology over the last 25 years in the central and southern Aegean

Abstract

This contribution offers a brief survey of funerary archaeology undertaken in the central and southern Aegean over the course of the last 25 years. Major construction projects and salvage and systematic excavations have brought to light some 1,700 new Late Bronze Age tombs (i.e. 27% of the extant corpus). Despite these discoveries, however, very few tombs have received a final publication and few of these projects are context driven. New data are and will continue to be desirable – but it is the quality of the recording of these data, our research questions and the careful application of new methodologies, during and after excavation, that will open up new interpretative avenues and debates. With the number of secure archaeological contexts dwindling fast, not least because of the constant threat of looting, developing new approaches (for example understanding site formation and episodes of use) is crucial if we are to recover as much as possible and advance our knowledge of the multivalent roles played by burials within ancient societies.

Establishing the Middle Sea: The Late Bronze Age of Mediterranean Europe (1700–900 BC)

“…More than 6000 tombs have been excavated in the southern Greek mainland over the last 150 years, forming the single most extensive dataset for researching the Aegean LBA. There is a plethora of burial types, especially during the early LBA, and there is considerable regional variation in terms of artifactual frequencies, burial practices, and architectural preferences (Cavanagh and Mee 1998;Galanakis 2018;Papadimitriou 2018).…”

Palatial Crete: recent discoveries & research, 2014–2019

“…This starting point was chosen because the last contribution to AR on discoveries on Crete (from prehistory to the Hellenistic era) was published in 2014 (Haysom 2014), followed by a thematic article on Minoan extra-urban sanctuaries in 2015 (Haysom 2015). Recent discoveries of Late Minoan tombs have also been covered in a general survey of recent funerary data from across the southern Aegean (Galanakis 2018). The chronological and cultural framework of this present contribution covers the period of Cretan prehistory following the Early Bronze Age, which is discussed in the previous volume of AR (Legarra Herrero 2019a).…”