Bioarchaeology is the contextual analysis of human remains in their archaeological context. Social bioarchaeology focuses on exploring social aspects of the life and death of past people, their social identities, and burial practices. In this framework, MYSOBIO investigates the complex relationship between funerary treatment and wider social dynamics through a novel interpretive model based on the contextual analysis of human skeletal remains and associated mortuary data. The main aim is to reconstruct, to a new level of detail, development in Mycenaean mortuary practice in the Late Bronze Age Aegean (LBA, 1700-1050 BC). This is a key area for the emergence of the first advanced European civilisations in the 2nd millennium BC. The transition from the Middle to the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1700 BC) in the Aegean was characterised by an increase in social complexity that led to the emergence of the Mycenaean palaces a few centuries later. These developments were paralleled by significant changes in funerary customs, mostly characterised by a shift from the relatively homogeneous and simple single burials of the Middle Bronze Age to a complex funerary ritual, featuring collective burials, tomb re-use, and variable primary and secondary mortuary treatment. Several questions arise: how uniform or variable was the mortuary treatment and how is diversity to be explained? What were the pre-eminent social identities (gender, age, status, kin) expressed and how were social relations re-defined on death? Most importantly, why were these practices introduced at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age, how did they evolve through the palatial times, and why did they change after the collapse of the palaces?
MYSOBIO unravels the diversity of social responses at death and their mutual relationship with wider socio-political developments, instrumental in the rise and fall of the Mycenaean palaces, one of the first complex societies in Europe. To achieve this, it employs, for the first time, a holistic bioarchaeological approach that integrates up-to-date theoretical reflection in mortuary archaeology with cutting-edge, interdisciplinary scientific advances in the study of collective skeletal assemblages. This methodology brings together traditional archaeology, current mortuary theory, biological anthropology, archaeothanatology and funerary taphonomy, further enhanced by state-of-the-art technological innovations from other scientific fields (social geography, geomatics, forensic sciences, archaeogenetics). Hence, MYSOBIO formulates a new methodological pathway to the social dimensions of prehistoric mortuary assemblages, by creating critical new knowledge in the following key areas: i) social developments in the LBA Aegean; ii) field and lab documentation and analysis of commingled human skeletal assemblages; iii) multi-disciplinary approaches in social bioarchaeology.
