Love beyond What Is Lost: Expressions of Kinship through Mortuary Practice at Phaleron Cemetery

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While discussions of kinship in Ancient Greece have largely been limited to the elite and their families, the Archaic cemetery of Phaleron (700–480 BC) provides a unique opportunity to investigate kinship relationships among people of lower socioeconomic status. This is especially true of interments of children, which can be interpreted not only as a representation of that child’s role in society, but a material expression of kinship by a child’s parents or kin. Children buried at Phaleron tended to have much richer mortuary assemblages than adults and thus provide a window into not only the public mourning communicated through the burial itself, but expressions of grief through what parents or other kin chose to provide their children in death. This study investigates case studies of infants and young children, selected first by age-at-death and grave accompaniments, including the ceramic vessels in which they were interred and those provided to them, mainly oinochoes, cups, and skyphoi. By examining parental care both prior to and after death, this study explores kinship not in terms of biological relationships between individuals within a cemetery, but through the emotional attachments of those who buried their children.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36017.0