Monuments for the Living, Monuments for the Dead: A Stone-by-Stone Guide to Mycenaean State Formation

Summary

Prior to the appearance of the first palaces at Mycenae in the 15th century B.C., the most impressive architectural manifestation of elite authority in the Argolid was not the palace or the house, but rather the tomb, specifically the shaft grave and the tholos tomb. While the funerary data supplied by these burials have long served as the primary means by which the study of Early Mycenaean state formation has been approached, such studies focus almost exclusively on the grave goods themselves, rather than the tombs that housed them. This paper seeks to address this lacuna by applying an energetics approach to the funerary landscape, an approach that posits that the quantity of labour expended upon any particular architectural project correlates with the socio-political complexity of the society that produced it. Since one aspect of socio-political power is defined by differential access to labour resources, the values thus generated serve as quantifiable and easily comparable measures of the power of those groups responsible for their undertaking. This approach injects a new, yet rarely considered dimension to current discussions of “wealth” and “status” and offers new insight into the nature of the socio-political transformations that transpired during the Early Mycenaean Period.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Architectural Energetics

Keywords

Spatial Coverage