Honouring the Dead in the Peloponnese - University of Nottingham

Tomb form and social message is the focus of the publication by Lambropoulos,
Moutzouridis and Nikolentzos of two recently-excavated cemeteries in Elis. Moschos
illustrates the other end of the Mycenaean epoch by examining social status and burial
practices during its final period after the collapse of the palaces; in a radically transformed
social and political world, the imagery and material expression used in the past is still
exploited, but exploited to tell a very different story. The interplay of communal, ethnic and
even linguistic identity with ritual practice lies at the heart of Luce’s analysis of Early Iron
Age grave types.
Dimakis takes the analysis later still in his review of individual and collective identity in
Argos of the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Grigorakakis presents new cemetery evidence
from the highly contested territory of the Thyreatis. Fritzilas looks to grave stelai of
Hellenistic and Roman date from Arkadia, and how they attempt to commemorate and
preserve the memory of the dead. Reinvented tradition and the concrete memorialisation of
the family make for a fascinating counterpoint in the papers of Gavala and Saitas on recent
historical monuments. Another aspect of the presentation of the dead is the use of jewellery to
sculpt the body, this is explored by Theodorou-Mavromatidi for the Early Bronze Age and
Louka for the Archaic period.
The argument which develops through this rich variety of illustration in no way underplays
the strong emotion evoked by death – indeed this precisely gives the ritual and the
symbolism their power, even though they are formalized and pressed into moulds of social
and political conformity. In the papers that follow, we note the play and counterplay of
political manipulation, the idealization of the dead and its use to model civic and moral
virtue, the importance of ancestors and ancestry as symbols of identity and belonging, as well
as display and conspicuous consumption and its dialectic between the community and the
(family) group.
The range of different approaches and of different types of material does not allow any single
theoretical viewpoint to dominate the contributions. Instead we have a mosaic of studies
exploring in different ways how death was memorialised, and how the process reflected
social aspirations of those who created the memorials, or sought to exploit the management
of death for social or political purposes. Though all are drawn from the relatively limited
area of the Peloponnese, the wealth of material offered by the Peloponnese means that the
volume illustrates the issues currently being addressed in the study of death and the dead in
the Greek world.
WGC
JR
xxviii