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Mortuary behaviour and social organisation in Pre- and Protopalatial Crete

The mortuary record of Pre- and Protopalatial Crete comprises the main corpus of data available for the study of these periods on the island. Although the evidence from funerary contexts has been the object of study for over a century, most of the work produced so far has not been founded upon clear methodological and theoretical approaches. This has resulted in an underachievement in the extraction of information from the record, and a failure to take the intricate relationship between the study of the mortuary record and the understanding of the social organisation of living communities into proper consideration. The aim of this work is to produce a new, comprehensive study of the entire mortuary record of Pre- and Protopalatial Crete. It revises the published data in accordance with a new methodology that applies a bottom-up, comprehensive approach to the record. Combining monographic studies of Cretan material culture with newly published data into the context of the tomb and the cemetery allows a more accurate and rich understanding of the archaeological evidence from burial sites. Consequently, the detailed picture of spatial and temporal variations and patterns in mortuary behaviour that this study produces can be used to create a more complex model for the use and role of cemeteries for Cretan communities. A clear new theoretical and methodological approach permits to use the new fluid and complex model of the mortuary behaviour for re-examining Cretan communities during the Pre- and Protopalatial periods and understanding them both in terms of both horizontal and vertical organisation and within a complex spatial and temporal framework.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:441292
Date January 2007
CreatorsLegarra Herrero, Borja
PublisherUniversity College London (University of London)
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1445176/

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