At the beginning of the Late Bronze Age (LBA, c. 1600-1100 BCE), the Greeks of the mainland, now referred to as the Mycenaeans, made a series of changes to their mortuary customs that emphasized the reperformative nature of the funeral. At the heart of these modifications was the desire to reengage with the tombs and mortuary assemblages of previous burials. This led to the adoption of new tombs that could accommodate multiple burials over several generations, an increase in the number and type of artifacts deposited in the tomb, a move to extramural cemeteries, and the development of new practices that required direct engagement with previous mortuary assemblages. Aegean prehistorians have done a great deal to reconstruct mortuary practices within chamber tombs, consider the ways in which the tomb acted as an arena for conspicuous consumption, and interrogate how mortuary evidence can explain the development of the palatial system represented in the Linear B tablets. However, more work needs to be done to consider how the evolution of tombs, cemeteries, and burial assemblages in the Mycenaean world altered the ways individuals and the community structured and engaged with their mortuary practices, and in what ways this new performance tradition reflected or shaped other aspects of Mycenaean society.
To better understand the effect these changes had on mortuary practices and their wider impact on Mycenaean culture, this dissertation employs a methodology that is both comparative and performative. In the first part of my analysis, I juxtapose Mycenaean tombs, cemeteries, and funerary assemblages from the Argolid (Prosymna, Dendra, Asine, and Mycenae) and Corinthia (Aidonia and Ayia Sotira) against contemporary ancient Egyptian parallels, especially from New Kingdom Thebes (modern-day Luxor), to contextualize important aspects of the Mycenaean evidence that warrant further exploration. I then turn to scholarship within Performance Studies to interpret how the modifications to the mortuary landscape impacted funerary rituals. Over the past decade, Aegean archaeologists have started to recognize the usefulness of performance as a paradigm to interrogate certain phenomena in the Mycenaean world. Though this work has offered new and fruitful interpretive frameworks, to date there has been very little engagement with the field of Performance Studies. By engaging with the work of performance theorists such as Schechner, Schneider, Butler, Taylor, and Auslander, my dissertation invites us to rethink the nature of these spaces, objects, and rituals, how they acted on and through the performers, and their larger role in Mycenaean society.
This dissertation not only encourages us to challenge monolithic narratives of the Mycenaean past that center the palace and elite culture, but it also invites us to center embodied action in our scholarship and provides the methodological framework necessary to do this work. Similarly, this approach demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary engagements that help us to recontextualize our evidence and question long-held assumptions about the nature of the Mycenaean funeral and its place in society.
