The Mycenaean Feast: an introduction

Hesperia, Spring, 2004 by James C. Wright

In 2001, I participated in a conference on the culture and cuisine of the prehistoric Aegean, sponsored by the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at the University at Sheffield. (1) Many of the papers focused in one way or another on feasting, and I realized that the archaeological remains of feasting were more abundant than I had suspected. Especially interesting was the amount of evidence from different sources that elucidated feasting in Mycenaean society. I decided that it would be worthwhile to organize a conference on that subject, and, initially collaborating with Sharon Stocker, proposed a session entitled "The Mycenaean Feast" for the 103rd Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), to be held in Philadelphia in January 2002. We wished to demonstrate that the archaeological record was sufficiently rich to allow the identification and characterization of the practice of feasting in Mycenaean times. We therefore invited colleagues to contribute papers approaching this issue from a number of perspectives, using several varieties of evidence: iconographic, artifactual, textual, faunal, and contextual (actual deposits). (2)

The papers presented in Philadelphia included one by Jack Davis and Stocker on the evidence from the Palace of Nestor at Pylos; another on a deposit from Tsoungiza by Mary Dabney, Paul Halstead, and Patrick Thomas; one by Lisa Bendall on the textual and archaeological evidence from Pylos; and my own investigation of the problem of identifying feasting from tomb assemblages, as depicted on frescoes, and from other sources. If these papers succeeded in characterizing a distinctive "Mycenaean" practice, that practice could be further defined by contrasting it with those from cultures in contact with the Mycenaeans. Thus, we also invited Elisabetta Borgna to talk about Minoan feasting, with special reference to the evidence from Phaistos, and Louise Steel to discuss feasting in Late Bronze Age Cyprus. Both were charged to consider how practices in their areas were affected by Mycenaean customs of feasting, and to what extent local practices continued or even resisted the introduction of new practices. Robin Hagg served as the respondent and compared and contrasted the Late Bronze Age evidence with later Greek practices of feasting and sacrifice. Afterward, the participants agreed that it would be worthwhile to rework our papers and present them for publication, and Tracey Cullen suggested we consider publishing them as a special issue of Hesperia.

In the course of pulling this volume together, changes were made. Bendall's paper will appear in the publication of the Sheffield Conference and therefore is not included here. (3) I invited Thomas Palaima to contribute a paper that treated the Linear B evidence, an exceptionally rich and fundamental source of information. A study of feasting in the Homeric epics and during the Iron Age was needed to round out the subject, and Susan Sherratt accepted the challenge. Together, the authors survey the different kinds of evidence for feasting during the Mycenaean era, set this evidence in the context of feasting practices among interdependent cultures, and consider the difficult issue of a tradition and its transformation as the "civilization" that practiced it becomes only a practice of memory.

Thematic conferences are common in the discipline of Aegean pre-and protohistory, and have dealt with subjects such as invasions and migrations, 4 the "Minoan thalassocracy," (5) death and burial customs, (6) the state, (7) warfare, (8) religion, (9) urbanism, (10) and economy and politics (11)--to name only a few. Fewer have been solely concerned with the Mycenaeans, (12) and fewer yet have chosen a theme that is a specific social practice. The reason for this may be that archaeologists are not comfortable exploring social practices, which are difficult to document through the material record. For example, if it is difficult for archaeologists to reconstruct religion, even in the abstract, it is more difficult, if not altogether questionable, to try to understand highly social practices such as marriage, kinship, and feasting. That we make the effort to do so today represents the extent to which we have made sufficient advances in our examination of evidence. Addressing these issues has required overcoming skepticism about the limits of archaeological inquiry, (13) and the development of methods of analysis that move beyond traditional concerns with typology, chronology, and distribution. This renewed interest in recovering social aspects of ancient societies is functional in that it reflects a desire to know how and for what purpose objects were created and employed by humans; it also, however, grows out of our increasing recognition that the issues of production and consumption that have interested us for decades are products of the social agency of individuals and of corporate bodies. (14)

Skeptics of archaeology's ability to explain past events base their concern on the unbridgeable maw that separates the material past from the present. The conceptual gap lies between the material remains of the past and the intentions and actions of humans who created them, and it is argued that it can be bridged through the use of ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological analogy. This argument, however, rests on the assumption that humans acted in the past in much the same manner in which they do today. If archaeology is ever to contribute to our understanding of the past, it is necessary that we employ analogy. In this sense, archaeology, like other interpretive disciplines of the humanities, is a "theoretically informed practice." (15) Ethnography is fundamental to such an archaeology, but, as Comaroff and Comaroff claim, it must be an ethnography that bears