OIKOS Master Class: The Natural World in Antiquity

Activity: Talk and presentationAcademic presentationAcademic

Description

OIKOS Master Class in Athens on the theme of 'The Natural World in Antiquity' in Athens. Master: Professor Greg Woolf. I gave a paper on 'Funerary Landscapes in Ancient Greece'. Abstract of Paper: When someone dies, the surviving group is left with his or her physical remains and these have to be dealt with in one way or another. In most societies these remains are either buried or cremated somewhere in the vicinity of the place where people lived. In this paper I want to ask the question where people bury their dead and why? Which location in the landscape was considered suitable for the deposition of human remains? And for which practical, legal, strategic, rational or irrational reasons? I ask these questions for Greece in the Roman period, which is a time in which the traditional modes of burial undergo significant changes under the situation of Empire. Archaeology of the landscape has been defined as ‘the spatial study of human interaction’ in which the landscape is primarily a setting in which social things take place. Researchers studying mortuary practices, or the funerary landscape, have approached the landscape in a similar way, namely as ‘the location where burials take place’ (placing burials on a map). Although the spatial organization of a cemetery is a very important aspect, it is not all there is to a burial; a burial is not just the deposition of a dead body into the ground. The act of placing a body is imbued with tradition, with beliefs, with ideas about society, and with emotion. A burial is a meaningful act. Burying someone somewhere, therefore, gives meaning to this location: it is made a place of remembrance. In thinking about the funerary landscape we should thus always consider the reasons why this particular location was chosen for the repeated disposal of the dead (and why this varies through space and time), and why and how this specific area was transformed into a place of not only remembrance, but also into a focal point of communal identity.
Period13-Jun-201422-Jun-2014
Event titleOIKOS Master Class: The Natural World in Antiquity
Event typeWorkshop
LocationAthens, United KingdomShow on map