Abstract
Scholarship on age and gender in prehistoric Greece has taken an adult-centric approach with focus placed mostly on young to middle-aged men and women and, as a result, two significant age groups – children and the elderly – have been widely neglected. Lacking a strong insight into attitudes that were shown towards these two age groups, however means that archaeologists do not really harbour a concept of the whole span of life in the cultures that developed in the Aegean region during the Late Bronze Age. Making children and the elderly visible in the archaeological record and examining their social roles, agency and interactions is vital for a better understanding of the social workings of the prehistoric Aegean world. Integrating an interdisciplinary methodology with a systematic study of the available material remains – ranging from the study of funerary contexts to iconographic sources and textual references, this study seeks to assess the evidence for childhood and old age in the Late Bronze Age Aegean, and to shed light − for the first time − on the interactions between the younger and older segments of the population in both life and death from the mid-seventeenth to the twelfth centuries BC.
Highlights
Whereas a remarkable amount of research has been undertaken on the perception of gender in the prehistoric Aegean since, at least the early 1990s,1 little work has focused on the social meanings attached to childhood and old age by the Aegean societies of the second millennium BC, or on the contribution of these two age grades to the formation of social and cultural identities in the region
Children and the elderly are generally underrepresented in the archaeological record of the Late Bronze Age Aegean as a result of collective burial, the reuse of tombs and the performance of post-funerary rites which encouraged ritual interference with, and re-arrangement of, the skeletal remains and of the burial offerings, obscuring the secure identification of child and elderly burials (Gallou 2004; in press; Gallou-Minopetrou 2015, 57)
Scholars have started to identify ‘marginalised’ groups in prehistoric Aegean iconography, including children of various age grades and, less frequently, elderly individuals. Though, with this lack of a strong insight into the attitudes that were shown towards these two age groups, archaeologists cannot really harbour a concept of the whole span of life in the cultures that developed in the Aegean region during the Late Bronze Age
Summary
Scholarship on age and gender in prehistoric Greece has taken an adult-centric approach with focus placed mostly on young to middle-aged men and women and, as a result, two significant age groups – children and the elderly – have been widely neglected. Lacking a strong insight into attitudes that were shown towards these two age groups, means that archaeologists do not really harbour a concept of the whole span of life in the cultures that developed in the Aegean region during the Late Bronze Age. Making children and the elderly visible in the archaeological record and examining their social roles, agency and interactions is vital for a better understanding of the social workings of the prehistoric Aegean world.
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