eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

and enhance the sanctity of the place and those in authority. No longer was the landscape
open and accessible. The hill of Artemision-Ayios Ilias, where there was little sign of the
past, may have suggested itself as an appropriate burial ground, having no sign of past life.
The remains of the dam, that may well have fallen into disrepair at the end of the BA could
have suggested the boundary between, or reinforced the truth of, the separate identities of
those living to the south on the Tegean plain and those to the north. In support of this is the
evidence from the earliest phases of the sanctuary of Artemis on Ptolis and the Temples of
Athena Alea at Tegea. Despite the fact that Tegea manufactured its own votives and
transported them far and wide (Morgan, 1999: 390; Voyatzis, 1990: 87-89, 203, 208, 220-
222, 254, 1995: 277) those at Ptolis, immediately to the north, show very little similarity.
Those living on the Mantinean plain, as a way of expressing their unique identity, actively
rejected bronzes made at Tegean workshops.
These early ‘Mantineans’ inhabited an easily definable landscape that enabled a new or
growing population to assert its control on their territory, where the elite could appropriate the
past and impose control thus mapping the ‘new’ order on their surroundings. It has been
proposed that G settlements would have been scattered on the plain (Morgan 1999, 390). The
people who worshipped at Gortsouli and buried their dead on Artemision would need to have
lived somewhere in the vicinity, if this were the case. The plain was the landscape of the
everyday, the hills around associated with religious and sacred rituals enacted during worship
and burial of the dead. The hills, however, would also have been part of the everyday,
perhaps viewed and apprehended to various extents, serving to remind those tilling their
fields, droving their flocks, meeting with friends and family, cooking, creating, or teaching
their children, of the order of their reality, reinforcing the mythological and cosmological
beliefs of their community.
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