Representations
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Representations

Material and immaterial modes of communication in the Bronze Age Aegean

John Bennet, John Bennet

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eBook - ePub

Representations

Material and immaterial modes of communication in the Bronze Age Aegean

John Bennet, John Bennet

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About This Book

This volume presents a series of reflections on modes of communication in the Bronze Age Aegean, drawing on papers presented at two round table workshops of the Sheffield Centre for Aegean Archaeology on 'Technologies of Representation' and 'Writing and Non-Writing in the Bronze Age Aegean'. Each was designed to capture current developments in these interrelated research areas and also to help elide boundaries between 'science-based' and 'humanities-based' approaches, and between those focused on written communication (especially its content) and those interested in broader modes of communication. Contributions are arranged thematically in three groups: the first concerns primarily non-written communication, the second mainly written communication, and the third blurs this somewhat arbitrary distinction. Topics in the first group include use of color in wall-paintings at Late Bronze Age Pylos; a re-interpretation of the 'Harvester Vase' from Ayia Triada; re-readings of the sequence of grave stelae at Mycenae, of Aegean representations of warfare, and of how ritual architecture is represented in the Knossos wall-paintings; and the use of painted media to represent depictions in other (lost) media such as cloth. Topics in the second group range from defining Aegean writing itself, through the contexts for literacy and how the Linear B script represented language, to a historical exploration of early attempts at deciphering Linear B. In the third group Linear B texts and archaeological data are used to explore how people were represented diacritically through taste and smell, and how different qualities of time were expressed both textually and materially; the roles of images in Aegean scripts, complemented by a Peircian analysis of early Cretan writing; a consideration of the complementary role of (non-literate) sealing and (literate) writing practices; and concludes with a further exploration of the color palette used at Pylos.

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Publisher
Oxbow Books
Year
2021
ISBN
9781789256420
Chapter 1
Image, context and worldview: Peak sanctuaries, tripartite buildings and the palace at Knossos
Matthew Haysom
In comparison to most prehistoric archaeologies, the archaeology of Bronze Age Crete offers an unusually rich seam of imagery. It presents a great opportunity to develop a distinctively archaeological approach to images in the absence of complementary texts. The outline of such an approach should be fairly uncontroversial. Just as Gell (1998) argued an anthropological approach to art should be like other anthropological approaches only applied to art objects, so an archaeological approach to images should be like other archaeological approaches only with imagery at its centre. Images should, in other words, be placed in patterns of association, distribution and change; patterns that encompass not only other images but also the full body of the material record. These patterns should be interrogated through comparative perspectives, making use of the full arsenal of modern archaeological theory.
Crete is a profitable environment for such an approach, not only because of its wealth of imagery, but also because of the rich accompanying contextual information. Neopalatial archaeologists like to lament their lack of data as much as anyone, but it has been a long time since they could argue with any conviction that only palaces and the prestigious can be understood. Extensive portions of settlements at every point on the settlement hierarchy have been excavated and published. Archaeological survey encompasses almost every Cretan environment from mountainsides to the core of the largest settlement. We do not have to face the problems of northern European prehistorians whose most elaborate images, like the Gundestrop Cauldron, float more or less contextless in a generalised Europe-wide milieu (Davidson 1993: 25–31; Aldhouse-Green 2004: 117–21; Harding 2007: 224–7).
A recent major contribution to the study of Minoan ‘art’ has pointed out how scholarship on the Aegean Bronze Age, in common with other prehistoric archaeologies, has become increasingly compartmentalised into specialisms: a process that naturally hinders contextual analysis. It describes how, in the process, ‘art’ objects have dropped off the radar of many Aegean archaeologists, as a result of the impression that they require an approach that is ‘universalising and decontextualising, one which seems at odds with them existing in a multi-sensorial social world’ (Knappett 2020: 11). The historiography of the two images, which this paper concerns itself with, can be seen as an illustration of this compartmentalisation in action. The first image is that on a relief stone rhyton found in the palace of Zakros known as ‘The Sanctuary Rhyton’ and the second is the wall painting from the palace of Knossos known as the ‘Grandstand Fresco’. It will be my argument in this paper that these two images give us unique evidence of changing discourses around Minoan peak sanctuaries. This conclusion can, I believe, be readily and firmly established on contextual grounds, but it has been overlooked because of the fragmentation of the scholarship. Although, as we shall see, the affinities between these two images have been periodically noted, they have entered quite separate narratives within Minoan scholarship. The Sanctuary Rhyton was recognised early as being a potential depiction of a peak sanctuary and scholarship around it since has remained focused on debating this interpretation. The Grandstand Fresco, meanwhile, was identified by Evans as a depiction of the central court of the palace at Knossos and, while doubts have been raised about the reconstruction of the architecture in the central court that accompanied this interpretation, the wall painting itself is consistently seen as a depiction of something occurring within a settlement. It is regularly used as an emblematic image of the mass festivities that all scholars agree must have occurred in and around palaces (for a recent example see Lupack 2010: 256). As a result of entering two relatively distant narratives within the discipline, the questions raised by the similarities between these images have long remained insufficiently interrogated.
Knappett (2020: 28–30) accompanies his manifesto for a recontextualisation of Minoan ‘art’ with an argument that the analyst’s starting point should be practice and with a persistent suspicion of the preceding emphasis in scholarship on the interpretation of what is being depicted. Informing this perspective is his long engagement with the ‘material turn’. It brings with it an appreciation of the material dimension of iconography and a breaking down of artificial boundaries between ‘art’ objects and other types of material culture that both enriches the study of Aegean iconography and brings it in line with developments in other archaeological fields (see Jones and Cochrane 2018). But the underlying sense that a discussion of what is being represented is a false starting point because it seems more mental and less material, is a methodological misstep and arguably falls into the very pitfall of cartesian dichotomies that Knappett has so carefully delineated. The insight of the material turn, that no form of culture is immaterial is essential. In Knappett’s terms ‘thinking happens through practices and these happen through things’. The ancient images we look at were created, used and viewed, by people embedded in a material world. Any understanding various people had of them would arise from their material experience of being in that world. But the idea that as analysts we can simply replicate that schema in our approach, and thus should necessarily start our investigation from practices, does not give sufficient notice that our position with respect to the material is not the same as that of the ancient people whose society we hope to gain insight into. As archaeologists we have access to material things distributed in space. Sometimes these things have pictures on them or seem to represent something else. Sometimes they are found consistently with or in other things. Sometimes there are consistent patterns to where they are found or what combination of things they are found with. Such patterns of contextual association encompass and transcend any engrained disciplinary divisions between objects, excavated spaces and iconographic content. It is this, objects and patterns of contextual association, that are the materials most proximate to us as archaeologists. From this modern analytical starting point ancient ‘meanings’ and ancient ‘practices’ are equidistant, both requiring an act of interpretation to access. To privilege one over the other would be a mistake. It is a privileging of one which Knappett is correctly reacting to, but to replace this with a privileging of the other would be to replicate that error. As this article will attempt to put into practice, a complete analysis of iconography must integrate, as far as possible, consideration of material, practice and meaning. But the paths it must follow in doing so are the contextual associations of the images as preserved in the archaeological record, and the main obstacles it must overcome are not any more theoretical, but the empirical problems posed by that record.
The Sanctuary Rhyton from Zakros (Fig. 1.1a) (Koehl 2006: 103–4, no. 204, containing bibliography to 1998) is a good example to think with about the degree to which our interpretation of the ancient practices and discourses around an ancient image is dependent on our interpretation of what is being depicted. And, how both interpretations, if they are to be firmly established, need to be dependent on an interconnected web of contextual associations. The contextual associations of the object, on their own, do reveal something about the practices related to it. It was found in the west wing of the palace at Zakros. This wing essentially consists of a series of storerooms and preparation rooms intercommunicating with a large hall (Platon 1971). The storerooms contain large numbers of drinking vessels. The formation processes by which the vessel’s fragments were scattered through the wing are not entirely clear. Koehl’s extensive studies of the rhyta (Koehl 1981; 1990; 2006; 2013) have revealed how an association between rhyta, drinking vessels and liquid storage is a very general phenomenon and how rhyta functioned (as they did elsewhere in the ancient eastern Mediterranean) as funnels and pipettes in the serving of liquid – ancient alcoholic beverages frequently needing filtering and flavouring to be appetising. The scale and elaboration of rhyta like the Sanctuary Rhyton would lend a theatricality to their use (Knappett 2020: 157). This would magnify the moment of serving, when liquid flowed from rhyton to receiving vessel, and the relationship between the server handling the unwieldy rhyton and the recipient. Moreover, the Sanctuary Rhyton belongs to a class of relief stone vases with a very striking distribution pattern (on the type see Logue 2004). Examples of the type are found most frequently at Knossos, where they are from secondary deposits. Outside Knossos, the type has been principally recovered from monumental central buildings, so-called villas and palaces. So far, then, contextual clues suggest practices around the vessel that elaborated serving, undertaken by a presumably privileged constituency associated with the palace, which had specific echoes in the practices of other similarly privileged constituencies, somehow orientated towards Knossos.
If we were able to confidently identify the structure depicted on the rhyton as a peak sanctuary, in line with its traditional interpretation, we could significantly enrich our understanding of the practices around the object, which otherwise have only minimal interplay with the image itself. We could, for instance, parallel this image’s recall within a settlement setting of extra-urban sanctuaries with similar phenomena elsewhere in the archaeological record. At house N in nearby Palaikastro (Sackett and Popham 1965: 256–68; 1970: 215–31), for example, the building’s drinking sets included rhyta in the form of an agrimi and a beetle. Both are common peak sanctuary images, and the latter is only rarely attested elsewhere. This situates the recall of peak sanctuaries in the context of elaborated serving practices by the constituency associated with the palace at Zakros within the context of similar practices attested by contemporary constituencies associated with much more humble buildings.
images
Fig. 1.1: a) The building on the Sanctuary Rhyton from Zakros; b) a stone rhyton fragment found on Gypsades hill at Knossos; c) a stone rhyton fragment from Knossos. Note the combination of horns of consecration and flagpoles with brackets consisting of concentric rectangles, common to all three (author’s drawings).
Another approach would be to contrast the depiction of the peak sanctuary on this vessel and others like it with the archaeological evidence from the sanctuaries themselves. The close affinities between the structure depicted on the Zakros rhyton and those on similar but more fragmentary vessels are well known (Fig. 1.1b–c) (Koehl 2006: 179–80, nos. 763 and 764). In the gaps and contrasts between these images and the archaeological record we might gain an insight into the nature of the discourse around peak sanctuaries enacted in the practices associated with the vessels. Comparing these images with the actual archaeological record of peak sanctuaries reveals inconsistencies. The terracing and temenos walls are reminiscent of Iouchtas or Petsoph...

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