Search Abstracts from Past Meetings

Mortuary Differentiation and Social Structure in Middle Helladic Lerna, Southern Greece, 2000–1500 B.C.
Eleni Milka, Groningen Institute of Archaeology

This presentation focuses on mortuary variation among the Middle Helladic and Late Helladic I (ca. 2000–1500 B.C.) burials in the intramural cemetery of Lerna, northeastern Peloponnese. This research is part of a new five-year project on the MH Argolid.

The aims of the analysis are: to examine whether variation in the type, construction, and wealth of the graves or the disposal of the dead represents differences between age, sex and burial (kin?) groups, and to reconstruct and explain processes of social, political, and cultural change during the Middle Helladic and the transition to the Late Helladic. These aims are achieved by means of a rigorous contextual analysis of the funerary data and the integration of archaeological and bioarchaeological data.

The analysis is based on the preliminary reports and publications of the Lerna excavations, as well as on new information and observations which derive from: the reexamination of the burial offerings; the study of the burial photographs; the reexamination of the skeletal material (by S. Triantaphyllou); the new dating of the graves, derived from C14 analysis (carried out at the Centre for Isotope Research, Groningen, The Netherlands); and the revised dates (kindly provided by C. Zerner). I suggest that the principle structuring mechanism during the Middle Helladic period was probably kinship rather than personal status. During the transition to Late Helladic, however, social divisions, as indicated in grave construction and wealth, became more apparent.

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