The Longboat and Society in the Cyclades in the Keros-Syros Culture

Abstract

Recent work on Early society and demography enables the role of the longboat in the Keros-Syros culture to be analyzed with a new precision. Considerations of community size are combined with the iconographic evidence for such vessels to support the possibly exclusive association of longboats with a small number of anomalously large settlements; the close link between longboat depictions and the Chalandriani cemetery is explored. It is argued that the context and associations of such depictions, combined with considerations of longboat design and the constraints on available manpower, militate against the likelihood that such vessels fulfilled a primarily trading role. Alternative functions (primarily coercive) are preferred and are integrated into a possible model for the growth of certain sites and the control of exchange during the period of the Keros-Syros culture. Available evidence indicates that the process of social change in the Cyclades during Early Bronze II displays important differences from contemporary processes elsewhere in the Aegean. The longboat has been seen for many years as one of the most important phenomena in the Cyclades during the middle of the third millennium B.C. Depictions of these craft on pans of the KerosSyros culture, combined with a series of lead models of apparently analogous boats, constitute some of the earliest evidence of specific boat forms known in the Aegean.1 As a result, the longboat has occupied a place of honor in a wide variety of studies whose emphases range from its use as evidence of ship design, to the wider issue of its importance as a reflection of technological advance, and to its role in the intensification of exchange in the Early Bronze II period.2 Here a different approach is adopted. Clearly the longboat must be integrated into the longer history of Aegean navigation and into the wider context of developments during EB II, but it will be argued that its specific importance cannot be understood until an attempt is made to see it from within the framework of Keros-Syros society. In short, the longboat repays consideration as evidence for a unit of social organization. Our knowledge of Early settlement is derived from the evidence available from a small number of excavations, combined with the picture revealed by field survey and the analysis of a large number of excavated cemeteries (fig. 1). Particularly in the second and third areas, the last decade has seen significant * I would like to thank my research supervisor, John Cherry, for his advice and encouragement throughout the writing of this paper. My thanks are also due to Peter Warren, Jack Davis, George Bass, Jeremy Rutter, Todd Whitelaw, and Jane Cocking, all of whom read earlier drafts and suggested numerous improvements, to David Wilson for invaluable information concerning Early Bronze Age Ayia Irini, as well as to Ann Brown at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and Janine Bourriau and Julie Dawson at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for their generous assistance in tracing the provenance of material. Lastly, I am particularly grateful to Peter Bellwood and John Terrell for their invaluable advice concerning questions of canoe travel and trade in the Pacific. The following abbreviations are used: Coleman 1985 J.E. Coleman, 'Frying Pans' of the Early Bronze Age Aegean, AJA 89 (1985) 191-219. Doumas 1977 C. Doumas, Early Bronze Age Burial Habits in the Cyclades (SIMA 48, G6teborg 1977). Johnston 1985 P.F. Johnston, Ship and Boat Models in Ancient Greece (Annapolis 1985). Renfrew 1972 A.C. Renfrew, The Emergence of Civilisation (London 1972). Renfrew and A.C. Renfrew and M. Wagstaff eds., An Wagstaff 1982 Island Polity (Cambridge 1982). 1 For the most recent presentation of the frying pan depictions, see Coleman 1985, 198-99 and Catalogue. A 13th example is in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (GR.18.1963) and is published in AR 1965-1966, 44-45. For the lead boat models see C. Renfrew, Cycladic Metallurgy and the Aegean Early Bronze Age, AJA 71 (1967) 5, Catalogue and pl. 3, and Johnston 1985, 5-12. 2 Johnston 1985, 7-11 for a summary of the bow/ high stern controversy and its application to the KerosSyros longboat. For discussion of the longboat as a reflection of technological advance and as a carrier of trade, see Renfrew 1972, 356, 358 and 455; also C.N.Runnels, Trade and the Demand for Millstones, in A.B. Knapp and T. Stech eds., Prehistoric Production and Exchange (Los Angeles 1985) 42-43.