The House and Domestic Ritual in the Early and Middle Bronze Age

(Center for Hellenic Studies Harvard University Summer Fellowship 2024-2025)

Over the course of this six-week fellowship, I was able to work primarily on my manuscript project, concerning the houses of Middle Bronze Age (MBA) mainland Greece. [1] In particular, I refined and elaborated two previously drafted chapters, especially with regard to updating the bibliography. My overall project concerns the treatment of houses in Early Helladic (EH) III through Late Helladic (LH) I/II, ca. 2200-1400 BCE, focusing particularly on the house as an object in time, with its own “life” and biography. I argue that the physical structure of the house came to represent the household—that is, the social “house”—and reflected the life-cycle rites of their living inhabitants. The house was instrumental in constructing an ancestral “place,” for both living and dead members of the household. This process (that of creating a house in all its meanings) occurred in various ways across the Greek mainland, and seems to have changed substantively over the course of the Bronze Age. Before going on to describe this project further, I would like to express my thanks to everyone at the Center for Hellenic Studies for the rich support (academic, administrative, and alimentary) throughout the duration of the fellowship.

My book examines the “life” of the mainland Greek house and the cycles of maintenance that allow it to grow in symbiosis with its inhabitants. These maintenance cycles are derived from studies of anthropology and modern vernacular architecture, and are useful in thinking about the multiple components that make up the physical form of the house, and how dynamic (or static) these components can be. [2] A case study at Asea provides an example—here, in its life, “House N” must have been an imposing structure, well-positioned at the settlement and probably full of rotating array of objects and furniture. [3] Though few details of the interior remain, other houses at the site suggest attention to the hearth, a concern with moderating the moisture in the roof, and possible interior reorganization over time. More importantly, there is a strong commitment to the general site of building, in preference to preserving the plan or reusing the foundations of earlier individual structures. I would argue that the adherence to “place” over “structure” suggests a periodic subsuming of the house/household into the broader whole of the accumulating house mound—manufactured evidence of the longevity of lineage groups and the claim not only to the land, but to the broader social identity of this group. This claim is even more charged when new building occurs on top of the earlier structure(s).

At the Center for Hellenic Studies, I used the idea of the life cycles of domestic structures to elaborate on conceptions surrounding the “death” and renewal of the house. Drawing on the work of Ruth Tringham, John Chapman, and Carl Knappett especially, I suggest that the end of the use-life of a house, whether by abandonment or by destruction, is always a deliberate sort of “death.” [4] I consider especially the evidence for deliberate destruction by fire at Lerna, but also the recent work of Eleni Milka that suggests that even abandoned houses were subsequently used for burial—in other words, not abandoned but transitioned to new functions. [5] I argue that these transitions in the role of the house (house of one household → house of another household, house of living household → house of dead household) were carefully mediated through actions ranging from the destruction/dismantling of the structure to the use of termination/foundation deposits of various natures, as well as the deliberate deposition of elements of the (destroyed/dismantled) house(hold), especially in places like Lerna. While this was perhaps most strongly marked during the EH III period, it seems to have continued at Lerna and other sites into the Middle Helladic (MH) and beyond—similar treatment of the house can be found at Pefkakia, for instance, as well as at Kolonna and elsewhere. [6] The result of this iterative behavior around houses, and to some extent perhaps its goal, is the creation of the house mound, more or less acting as a monument to the lineage group, as noted above. The house mound can be marked or unmarked (see for instance the use of upright stones to mark bothroi at Lerna, as well as the possible veneration of ruins at the sanctuary of Apollo Maleatas), but seems often to attract burial. [7] Certainly there are echoes with the shape and importance of tumuli and other mounded graves (perhaps even tholoi?) as well—this likewise sheds some light on the possible receptions/interpretations of the “ritual tumuli” covering architecture by people inhabiting those sites after their creation (regardless of who constructed them). [8]

The support of the Center for Hellenic Studies was instrumental especially in expanding the bibliography of the second and third chapters, which has strengthened the argumentation especially around the idea of domestic religion. As many have recognized, the identification in prehistoric contexts of ritual practice in general and of the veneration of ancestors in particular is fraught, and so demands the support of a broad base of evidence. [9] Drawing especially on recent cross-cultural work on the archaeology of ancestors, as well as Antonaccio’s seminal book on the veneration of ancestors in Early Iron Age and Archaic Greece, I have been able to suggest that the house in EH III-LH I/II Greece did take on the characteristics of an ancestral place, with several supporting material correlates that are commonly attested worldwide. [10] This work builds on the earlier (but still fairly recent) work on religion in MH contexts by Helene Whittaker, who acknowledges the likely importance of domestic ritual and ancestor veneration without exploring it deeply. [11] My contribution is to examine how and when the house might have become symbolically charged, and to what extent correlates of such belief surrounding houses can be identified in the archaeological record. I suggest that special treatment at the end of the houses’ use life and/or prior to new construction is an especially rich indicator of transitional rituals, but the widely-known use domestic spaces for burial at this time must also play a role in marking/maintaining ancestral spaces, as has been noted, for instance, by Boyd and others. [12]

Ultimately, I suggest that there is tension between what has in other archaeological contexts been called a “history house” approach to remembering/reconstructing the house and a more distributed veneration of ancestors. [13] In other words, there is tension between specific, known ancestries and their observation by individual groups claiming membership in this lineage (the “house”), and a more generalized idea of the past, anonymized and relating to larger social groups, including the settlement as a whole. This idea ultimately plays out in the appearance of cemeteries at several sites, for instance, but also in a lessening of attention to the physical house except by restricted, often well-resourced parties (the increasing restriction of elite burial practices, such as tholoi, may also be related). [14] There may also be some evidence for the deliberate curation of ruins and ruined areas within the living settlement space to create a generalized sense of the presence of the past within that space, without attaching that past to specific families—I discuss a possible case at Eutresis. Similarly, increasing efforts around public architecture like fortification walls suggest that social definitions were expanding to include larger groups, demonstrated relatively early at places like Kolonna and Aspis-Argos, but common by the LH period. [15] Iterative behaviors around the house do not stop, but the best evidence for this behavior is now within the palaces themselves—the function of the house for the majority of the population of LH Greece, then, seems to have changed, shifting away from a “living” space and a dynamic signifier of the family group. [16]

I plan to complete this project within the next year. During the Fellowship, in addition to work on the manuscript, I was also able to work on a conference paper on material in preparation for publication on the fortification at Malthi, an excavated settlement in Messenia. I also did additional research for another publication of conference proceedings on Central Greece during the Middle Bronze Age. These projects naturally also inform my book, if more indirectly. My thanks are due once again to the Center for Hellenic Studies for allowing me to complete this work.