A survey of evidence for feasting in Mycenaean Society

Hesperia, Spring, 2004 by James C. Wright

As Hayden points out, feasts have many practical benefits: creating cooperative relationships, alliances, and political power; mobilizing labor; and extracting and investing surpluses. (20) All of these activities of feasting are instrumental to the formation of complex societies. The communicative aspect of this process of social formation involves the creation and reproduction of styles that symbolize the dominant group, not merely through monosemic emblems but also through polysemic ones that represent salient activities and structural relations of the group. These styles are expressed iconographically and are part of the construction of a society's cosmology, of the proper relationships among people, society, and nature. (21)

The process of identity formation is an act of recording and, in stylistic terms, of constructing an iconographic synthesis, as Panofsky defined the phrase. (22) Such a synthesis necessarily excludes certain information, particularly aspects of activities not selected for inclusion in emblemic display, since recording is a proprietary act governed by social custom, by sociopolitical and ideological hierarchies, and prescribed by convention, tradition, dogma, and ritual action. In this way, as Davis and Bennet note, "specific regional traditions achieved supra-regional prominence," (23) though the resulting "dominant styles" are not merely passively accepted, but rather utilized and actively practiced, and hence inherently mutable. Consequently, what the modern observer can hope to achieve through the analysis of the archaeologically recovered material and written record of feasting is an understanding, however imperfect, of an iconography characteristic primarily of Mycenaean palace society. Aspects of feasting that are not specifically controlled or influenced by the palaces might also be apparent, but they are harder to discern, in large part for lack of redundancy in the archaeological record. A good example is provided in the article in this volume by Dabney, Halstead, and Thomas concerning a deposit at Tsoungiza, the interpretation of which depends in part on the artifactual connection with objects known primarily from palatial contexts. The variability and ubiquitous nature of feasting in any society means that feasts will leave variable archaeological traces; only those that are created through repetition and the relatively consistent utilization of identifiable remains are left for us to interpret with a high degree of probability. (24)

Representation of feasting may be understood as part of the very practice of feasting. It is also a part of the tradition that the Mycenaeans drew upon from Neopalatial Crete and the islands of the Aegean. An iconography of feasting in the palaces may have developed by LH IIIA but is only fully developed in the LH IIIB frescoes of the main building at Pylos (see below). By examining the development of this iconography, we will understand better the processes through which, over generations of interaction, elite groups came to control and administer the palace centers. As Davis and Bennet state, "Mycenaean material culture came to define the elite of those palaces and of the territories they controlled and influenced." (25)