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Toward the end of the third millennium B.C.E., Minoan funerary customs changed, and people began to favor the use of clay receptacles—pithoi or larnakes—for the bodies of the dead. This article offers a comprehensive study of the funerary pithoi of the period, comprising a review of the available material and its classification, distribution, and dating, the relation of container to tomb types, and the specific use of pithoi within funerary ritual. It also assesses the importance of pithoi as an investment in terms of the material wealth that they represent and the knowledge of the complex techniques of handling dead bodies that they require. Finally, it examines the symbolic connotations of the pithos and argues that its wide adoption was part of a general turn toward the concept of the regeneration of life. This concept shifted the emphasis of the funerary realm toward the social dimension—namely, toward the reallocation of the roles and resources of the dead among the living. Such a shift helped people come to terms with contemporary social reality and shaped the agency of emerging elites, which led to the establishment of the first Minoan palaces and transformed Crete from a series of kin-based communities to a group of proto-states.

This volume features a group of select peer-reviewed papers by an international group of authors, both younger and senior academics and researchers. It has its origins in a conference held at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, which aimed to bring up the frequently-neglected popular cult and other ritual practices in prehistoric and ancient Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. The topics covered by the chapters of the volume include the interplay between elite and popular ritual at cemeteries and peak sanctuaries just before and right after the establishment of the first palaces in Minoan Crete; the use of conical cups in Minoan ritual; the wide sharing of religious and other metaphysical beliefs as expressed in the wall-paintings of Akrotiri on the island of Thera; the significance of open-air sanctuaries, figurines and other informal cult and ritual paraphernalia in the Aegean, Cyprus and the Levant from the late bronze age to the archaic period; the role of figurines and caves in popular cult in the classical period; the practice of cursing in ancient Athens; and the popular element of sports games in ancient Greece.

The term “International Spirit” denotes the network of maritime communication and exchange in the southern Aegean during the third millennium BC, which is usually considered to be a relatively bounded sociohistorical phenomenon. This article exposes the need for understanding the International Spirit as a heterogeneous, dynamic, and open-ended field of social discourse. Such understanding is supported through the employment of recent advances in archaeological theory regarding cultural hybridization. It is suggested that the latter shares the same basic ways of operation with almost all other types of social communication. Therefore, the Early Bronze Age cemeteries in Attica, Euboea, or northern Crete, featuring assemblages with mixed cultural traits, should be considered as examples of such intense, and thus hybridizing, cultural discourse. The Early Cycladic communities may have pursued this type of interaction in order to balance between two pressing needs: subsistence through agropastoral activity and social reproduction through seafaring and exchange.

Toward the end of the third millennium B.C.E., Minoan funerary customs changed, and people began to favor the use of clay receptacles--pithoi or larnakes--for the bodies of the dead. This article offers a comprehensive study of the funerary pithoi of the period, comprising a review of the available material and its classification, distribution, and dating, the relation of container to tomb types, and the specific use of pithoi within funerary ritual. It also assesses the importance of pithoi as an investment in terms of the material wealth that they represent and the knowledge of the complex techniques of handling dead bodies that they require. Finally, it examines the symbolic connotations of the pithos and argues that its wide adoption was part of a general turn toward the concept of the regeneration of life. This concept shifted the emphasis of the funerary realm toward the social dimension--namely, toward the reallocation of the roles and resources of the dead among the living. Such a shift helped people come to terms with contemporary social reality and shaped the agency of emerging elites, which led to the establishment of the first Minoan palaces and transformed Crete from a series of kin-based communities to a group of proto-states. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Popular images of Minoan Crete frequently include scenes of ritual activity, such as processions, human figures in front of altars, or sanctuaries sometimes full of people. Indeed, research holds that ritual was not simply a fundamental component of social life on the island, but also a main axis of socio–historical evolution through the third and second millennium BC. Thus, it has been recently suggested that the Minoan palaces, the par excellence feature of Bronze Age Crete, were the equivalents of Syrian temples and not places of political authority (Schoep 2012). This is not the place to examine the political

Religion and ritual are exciting yet puzzling and difficult topics of research, as their study benefits significantly from an understanding of past people’s metaphysical beliefs. Prehistoric archaeology, whose lack of textual sources restricts its affordances for empathy entirely, often abandons the effort to reconstruct systems of religious ideas and, instead, tries to analyse the ways in which such systems affected past ways of life. As much as this alternative aim seems to be, and is, feasible, it asks archaeologists to reach into the deep structural levels of past cultures and understand some of the principles that underlie their mechanics. Traditional

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