Mycenaean Social Belonging from an Integrative Bioarchaeological Perspective

Project Information

MySocialBeIng

Grant agreement ID: 101001951

DOI

10.3030/101001951

EC signature date 27 January 2021

Start date 1 January 2022

End date 30 June 2027

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 999 751,00

EU contribution

€ 1 999 751,00

Coordinated by

LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITAET MUENCHEN
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MySocialBeIng (Mycenaean Social Belonging from an Integrative Bioarchaeological Perspective)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2024-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

When Heinrich Schliemann excavated the famous shaft graves of Mycenae in 1876, his rich findings attracted worldwide attention to this previously little-known prehistoric culture which kept fascinating a broad audience until now. Subsequently, the Late Bronze Age (LBA) of the 2nd mill. BC on the Greek Mainland was called “Mycenaean”, a modern term used broadly for LBA societies of Greece since then. The fact that several human individuals used to be buried together in the same grave already raised Schliemann’s thoughts about their social relationship. Believing in the historicity of the Homeric epics, Schliemann identified them as Agamemnon and his family and thereby initiated the debate about social belonging in Mycenaean Greece, which has still not been solved. In the past 100 years, hundreds of LBA collective graves of different types have been excavated on the Greek Mainland – from single tholos tombs to large chamber tomb cemeteries with hundreds of individuals buried in them – and these burials have become one of the hallmarks of the Mycenaean Era. It is clear that the selection of individuals for burial in a collective tomb (i.e. a tomb where over a period of time several deceased humans were buried) was based on notions of social relatedness between them and that the practices during and after burial at the necropolis also shaped social belonging within the community of the living. However, it is still unclear which factors guided the notions of social belonging which then determined the selection of individuals for the burial in a collective grave. Different terms have been used to name the social relations materialised in the collective graves, e.g. “family”, “kinship”, “household” or “oikos”. However, the character of these relations, their formation as well as their transformation over time and their diversity within LBA Greece are still hardly known. The unique richness of these burials has the potential for serving as a paradigmatic case to overcome one of the key challenges of archaeology, i.e. understanding the complexity of social belonging in the deep past and transcending the still dominant simplistic notions of biologically determined prehistoric “families”, a necessity already pointed out by critical researchers recently. Sociologists, anthropologists and historians have long been aware of the complexity of social institutions as long as sufficient literary sources and/or participant observation/interviews are available. For ancient Greece and Rome, the complexity of the oikos and the familia has become clear, which included biologically related and non-related individuals in one social entity, and similar insights have been reached for other early societies with sufficient textual and archaeological sources e.g. ancient Egypt. As soon as these sources fade out, biological determinism has usually entered archaeological interpretation. Whereas Mycenaean literary sources inform us about the importance of human mobility and the organisation of the different palace-based states, our knowledge about their social organisation beyond palatial administration is weak. It is now time to unravel the constitution of social belonging out of the dialectical interplay of biological relatedness and social practices and rethink the constituents of social structures in the past by applying a cutting-edge integrative bioarchaeological approach to the outstanding archaeological source material of the Mycenaean Era. Novel insights into the complexities of Mycenaean societies beyond the elites will not only revolutionise our understanding of LBA Greece and answer long-standing questions but also help to further establish an innovative integrative bioarchaeological approach and enable a deep historical understanding of the complexities of historic and present-day social relationships.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The main focus of the first 18 months of the project was the archaeological sampling and the archaeological contextualization of the samples as well as the scientific lab analyses, especially the aDNA analyses. All relevant samples have reached the laboratory (=Milestone 1). The archaeological evaluation and contextualization have gained momentum. We were even able to publish two ground-breaking articles: First, Skourtanioti et al. 2023 (with the PI as the last and corresponding author and in collaboration with the Max Planck Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean) shedding a revolutionary new light on social belonging in the Bronze Age Aegean and esp. unravelling the great importance of cousin-cousin-marriages which in its scale in the Bronze Age Aegean has no comparisons throughout human prehistory. Moreover, we were able to construct the first family pedigree ever generated for the ancient Mediterranean. Our results have also found great media interest and were featured by more than 120 news outlets all around the world (all countries of Europe and Southern America, USA, Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, China etc.) and in most prominent outlets (e.g. CNN, New York Post, Yahoo News, Tagesspiegel, Kathemerini, El Tiempo, The Times). With this paper, MySocialBeIng has already managed to completely transform our understanding of social belonging in the Bronze Age Aegean. In order to build the methodological basis for the radiocarbon modelling, we already started working on a methods paper (D6) already in year 1 and have been able to publish this paper as Massy et al. 2022 in PlosOne (with the PI as the last author and Mittnik as pre-last author) in collaboration with the Curt Engelhorn Centre of Archaeometry, Mannheim, where all radiocarbon dates within MySocialBeIng are being produced. After 18 months, we are now in the midst of lab analyses and further evaluation of datasets, which are promising further great results. The first DNA screening for the site of Elateia, i.e. the necropolis with the most samples to be studied within MySocialBeIng, indicated very promising overall DNA preservation. We are now looking forward to the production of DNA capture data sets and their subsequent evaluation and integration with the archaeological record.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

MySocialBeIng has already revolutionized our understanding of social belonging in the Bronze Age Aegean. No other region in human prehistory was marked by such a high degree of cousin-cousin-marriage which requests a particular explanation. The societal importance of this practice requests further reflection in order to trace its origings, reasons and long-term societal impact. Moreover, the project has been able to generate the first biological pedigree for individuals living in the same architectural entity, which has demonstrated that both - biological and cultural - aspects played a decisive role for the living together of human individuals. These insights are only the first of their kind and will now be supplemented by much larger datasets which are currently produced within the project and will be evaluated and published in the months and years to come.

Olive harvest, (c) Nikola Nevenov

Wheat harvest, (c) Nikola Nevenov

Minoan Goddess and DNA, (c) Eirini Skourtanioti