EAA 2023: Abstract

This presentation explores the biography of a storage jar going through changing yet interdependent ‘life stages’. The container was found in a burial context (the double burial of a male and a female) dating from the end of the Neolithic in a coastal cave of Laconia, Greece. The site forms part of a network of funerary caves on the same coast. We reconstruct the thread of the life of the jar as a skillfully crafted product originally that became a practical household object subsequently and finally a funerary facility. Certain practices that occurred during the burial episode affected its physical integrity and mark the transition from the domestic to the funerary. Nonetheless, the pithos comes to the burial with a strong symbolic register accumulated from its previous role as a domestic apparatus. This 'stored' resource is integrated into the new context and even becomes inextricable for the transformation of the jar as well as the assemblage and an agent empowering worldviews about the relationship between life and death.

Neolithic pottery, biography, Greece, burial context, mortuary, pithos jar

Oral presentation

  Abstract (PDF)

Stella Katsarou¹

Andreas Darlas¹