The Role of Feasting in the Development of Complexity in Minoan Society

Abstract

Feasting is one of the most ubiquitous communal activities in the history of humanity. Oftentimes, feasting is accompanied by a substantial amount of material culture that carries intimate details of the activities that took place at these events. In fact, the changes in the material culture of a feast can also inform us as to how society itself was transforming by becoming increasingly insular or shifting toward a more regional sense of identity. One of the established methods of analyzing a feast is through the examination of its ceramic assemblage. The Bronze Age site of Mochlos in East Crete has a well-stratified Early Minoan deposit which has provided me with an opportunity to interpret a number of social, political, and economic intricacies taking place in East Crete as Minoan society approached the palatial system that dominated the Middle and Late Minoan periods. In order to do this, I provide a background to my research, perform a ceramic study of the stratified deposit in question, interpret the results of the analysis, and include a cross-cultural investigation that serves to further enlighten the data from Mochlos. What is most important to take from this study is that Prepalatial society was not without complexity and structure, and, in reality, much of the complexity that we attribute to the palatial social system of the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE can be traced back to the second half of the 3rd millennium BCE.