The Role of Intercommunity Feasting in the Development of Social and Economic Complexity at Early Bronze Age Mochlos

Summary

Feasting is a ritualistic social activity that also serves to strengthen the solidarity of a group or reinforce its hierarchical structure. Most frequently found as an intragroup activity, it also occurs at the intergroup level. In this paper, I discuss intercommunity feasting as a social, political, and economic motivator that generated interactions that flourished during the Protopalatial period. Several deposits from the Minoan site of Mochlos in Eastern Crete bridge the entire Prepalatial period at Mochlos (3200-1900 BCE). They are capable of tracing communal eating and drinking from its inception at Mochlos through the final stages of the Prepalatial period after which a proto-state civilization appears on Crete. I finally compare the evidence from Mochlos with two case studies in Anatolia and Peru. Both of these case studies are of a similar level of complexity to Mochlos and also used feasting to promote and maintain cooperation between interregional allies and rivals. Upon synthesis, I propose that the societies that emerged at the end of the Prepalatial era were products of not only of cooperative but also competitive interactions between paramount individuals that took place during both large and small scale intercommunity feasts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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