Key Pages
Alex Knodell |Changes [Sep 14, 2008]
Curriculum Vitae
Plate 28 from Popham et al. Lefkandi II L E F K A N D I (website affiliated with Vassar) Plate 13 from Popham et al. Lefkandi II
The elite burials at the Iron Age site of Lefkandi have drastically changed our understanding of Greece in the so-called Dark Age (c. 1075-700 BC) over the last several years. Discovered in 1980, the Toumba structure containing the "Hero of Lefkandi" burial has been the subject of insightful scholarship and intense debate over the course of the last three decades. These debates have ranged from site-specific, concerning what came first: the building or the burial, to much broader arguments about the ordering of society in Iron Age Greece. The burial in question consists of two individuals in a single shaft shaped like a backward "L": a male cremation placed in a bronze Cypriot urn, and a female inhumation. The unique nature of the artifacts found in this burial completely changed the scholarly opinion about Dark/Early Iron Age Greece, not only because of the wealth represented by the materials, but also because of the extreme antiquity and provenance of some of the items. These discoveries have greatly influenced the way we think about this unique period in Greek Prehistory, and have been used to inform us about important societal elements such as foreign contact, trade, wealth, status, social stratification and many others, but surprisingly little time has been spent discussing in greater depth the items themselves that make up these burials. It is on these things that this project intends to focus. A wiki forum allows for a flexibility and scope not found in a paper, and, I think, will be an excellent medium for pursuing a project intended to deal with many diverse things on various level of extrapolation.
The Hero Burial can be looked at on many different levels, all of which are important in unpacking it as a thing and a concept. For example, I believe we can look at this particular thing on three different physical levels: the Heroon, the structure in which the burials are contained; the burial, comprised of everything in the shaft of the Heroon's central room; and the individual elements that make up the burial. All of these are demonstrative of the multiplicity of something so easy to describe in two words, and all could rightly be what someone is referencing when they talk about the "Hero Burial". It is not enough, however, to simply point out these multiplicities and diverse potential frames of reference. At the same time as they are valuable for understanding the thing itself, they are equally important to the study of the culture of which these things are a part.
Some key issues to be addressed on the different levels described above:
