Cemetery and Society in the Aegean Bronze Age.

• Author: MANNING, STURT W.
• Position: Review

Cemetery and Society in the Aegean Bronze Age. Edited by K. BRANIGAN. Sheffield Studies in Aegean Archaeology, vol. 1. Sheffield: SHEFFIELD ACADEMIC PRESS, 1998. Pp. 173, maps, illus. $21.50.

This is a mixed bag, typical of an edited conference volume. It is obvious that the conference (a round table with sixteen participants of whom thirteen publish here) was a success, although the "extensive discussion which followed each paper"--referred to by the editor in his preface and the purpose of such a meeting--is not included in the volume for the interest of readers not present at the conference. The present volume is inevitably neither complete in scope, nor unified in focus or period. However, it does admirably capture the freshness of innovative work by a number of younger scholars who one may expect to become significant figures in the future. Unusually for such a volume, there are no bad papers, and several good ones; the future of Aegean prehistory is in safe hands. The title should of course read "some aspects of...," and there is a lack of the significant introductory essay by the editor, as is usual for such a volume, which would have positioned the set of studies, and generally offered di scussion of the relevant theoretical literature, academic context, and historiography. As a result, the volume does not offer a general text on its subject, but rather a set of specialist studies of interest either to Aegean scholars, or those working elsewhere concerned with some current approaches to mortuary evidence in the Aegean. An emphasis on particularist, data-driven, approaches is evident; with some honorable exceptions, theoretical concerns prevalent in general mortuary archaeology are largely left to other scholars (outside Aegean prehistory).

The studies are grouped in three fairly loose divisions. Section one, "Cemeteries and Social and Political Landscapes," contains papers by Keith Branigan and Joanne Murphy. Both deal with the Mesara tholoi of pre-palatial (third millennium B.C.) south central Crete, discussing the role of the tombs in the human landscape and in social practice and ritual. Branigan thus returns to a subject he has written on repeatedly over almost thirty years. Murphy offers an analysis of the Mesara tholoi in which she identifies (as others have) the role of the tombs as markers in the landscape, but, more interestingly, she also discusses the developing exploitation of mortuary ritual at the tombs by emergent...