Creating identities in the mortuary arena of the Greek Final Neolithic: a contextual definition of practices in Central and Southern Greece

Abstract

Introduction: the chronological backgroundFor several decades in Greek prehistory, a division of the Neolithic and Bronze Age in units of three for each particular period has been established 1 . The Neolithic has been divided into Early, Middle and Late and each of them, except for the last, was further divided into three parts, a system mostly utilised in Thessaly and the Peloponnese (Demoule, Perlès 1993.398). Nevertheless, the efforts to group Neolithic cultures according to this tripartite chronological terminology do not seem to depict the reality successfully.In south-eastern Europe, the millennium that starts at the mid 5 th millennium BC forms a period that ABSTRACT -It is generally accepted that the Greek Final Neolithic witnessed many social and economic changes. However, few studies have explored the archaeological material of the period in a systematic and fully contextual manner. After analysing new material from a rescue excavation at Proskynas in east Lokris, central Greece, in combination with previous evidence, it is clear that most of our knowledge has come from the funerary domain, where acts of consumption and display of material culture took place. These included the deposition of artefacts in a mortuary context and in pits dug into the bedrock in the vicinity of the graves. The aim of this paper is to provide a contextual approach of the social and mortuary practices of the period in central and southern Greece and discuss their role to the creation of cultural identities. It is also suggested that these collective acts that occur primarily within the funerary domain may also imply a shift of interest from the domestic to the mortuary arena, which emerges as a new place for social negotiation at the end of the Neolithic period. IZVLE∞EK -