Damaged Pottery, Damaged Skulls at the Tsepi, Marathon Cemetery

This paper considers the Early Bronze Age (henceforth EBA) cemetery at Tsepi, near Marathon, where a large pit filled with pottery was discovered. The interpretation of the fill as burial offerings led us to clarify some novel funeral rites dated to the Late Chalcolithic period. Moreover, within the same cemetery, the mandible is frequently missing from the skulls and, in exceptional cases, it was dragged down or detached and placed next to the skeleton. The meaning of this treatment is unknown

THRAVSMA

How does intentionally inflicting damage to material objects mediate the human experience in the prehistoric eastern Mediterranean? For all of the diversity in cultural practice in the civilisations of the Greek mainland and Aegean islands, Crete, Cyprus and the eastern coast of Italy between 4000-750 BC, archaeologists consider the custom of ritually killing objects as a normative, if inconsistent practice. Yet as artefacts that are alike only in that they have been disarticulated, intentionally destroyed objects defy easy characterization. Such pieces frequently stand outside of clearly defined patterns. This volume is an initial step in addressing a gap in the scholarship by aiming to deconstruct and contextualize the practice of intentional fragmentation. The case studies in this volume present a diverse range of evidence, including pottery, lithics, metals, jewellery, figurines, buildings and human remains, in an exploration of the wide spectrum of meanings behind material destruction