Aegean feasting: a Minoan perspective

Hesperia, Spring, 2004 by Elisabetta Borgna

ABSTRACT

This survey of feasting in Bronze Age Crete reveals that feasts could be either exclusive elite celebrations or unrestricted occasions in which social identity rather than power was most important. In contrast, Mycenaean feasting on the Greek mainland seems to have arisen from elite customs aimed at exclusion. A comparison of the evidence for Late Minoan IIIC feasting at Phaistos and convivial practices on the mainland indicates new Mycenaean components to Cretan feasting, suggesting that the earlier pattern had shifted and that Cretan feasts had similarly become elite instruments of competition and negotiation for authority.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the archaeological evidence for convivial practices in Bronze Age Crete and to compare it with the material indications of feasting on the mainland of Greece. (1) Through comparison of Mycenaean evidence and two large LM IIIB-C pottery assemblages at Phaistos, I point out discrepancies as well as reciprocal contributions in traditions of Minoan and Mycenaean feasting. I suggest that the evidence from Phaistos demonstrates that communal drinking and feasts in LM IIIB-C Crete were celebrated to facilitate social communication and promote ideological strategies and political activities.

In the following study, I take into account the role that pottery plays in the investigation and recognition of social patterns in feasting. In ceramic studies, the application of ethnographically observed patterns of the deployment of decorative styles provides sociofunctional explanations of pottery usage. Variability among these patterns provides a key to understanding strategies of social communication and ideological and political manipulation of the occasions and places of social exchange. (2) According to one model, two modes of decorative variability point to two different social dynamics. (3) The first, qualitative variability (i.e., variability by alternation of the decorative elements and substitution or variation of secondary motifs and ornamental details), is employed to negotiate cultural and social identity within the context of balanced confrontations among equal social components; the second, additive or vertical variability (i.e., by accumulation and redundancy of decorative elements), expresses social competition aimed at establishing vertical relationships and hierarchical order.

FEASTING AT LM IIIC PHAISTOS

As I have discussed elsewhere, qualitative variability (substitution) at Phaistos was used for the decoration of LM IIIB and IIIB-C vessels in a symbolic style that asserts social divisions on a horizontal level, while quantitative variability (accumulation) marked the local expressions of the LM IIIC elaborate style, which was more generally associated with elite settlements and included many examples of pictorial pottery. (4) This latter style, in particular, might be explained as a kind of "elite" or "iconographic" style according to definitions applied in anthropological studies, by which decorative components are encoded with elite ideological and political messages. (5) The exclusive association of the most elaborate symbolic and iconographic styles with ceramics reserved for drinking (and possibly also for religious offerings) supports the hypothesis that highly competitive feasts were celebrated as occasions of conspicuous consumption and served to promote the ideological strategies of dominant groups during the last phases of Minoan civilization.

At Phaistos I have identified two sites where communal wine consumption and ritual meals took place, the summit of the Acropoli Mediana and the Casa a ovest del Piazzale I at its southern foot (Fig. 1). (6) The Acropoli Mediana is the settlement's highest and most visible site; toward the end of LM III it was used for convivial ceremonies. (7) The large number of kraters and deep bowls found in this area (see, e.g., Figs. 2, 4, 5:1, 3-5) indicates events with open, communal participation. (8) The many kraters accompanying the even more numerous deep bowls may make it possible to identify sets of vessels corresponding to independent units of distribution and consumption, which could have been used in a sequence of ongoing ceremonies from the end of LM IIIB until the middle of LM IIIC. The variability in fabric and morphology of the pottery (indicating different production units) may suggest that the participants in the feasts came from different residential sites around Phaistos.

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The elaborate decoration of this pottery (Figs. 2, 4, 5:1) may be a form of highly competitive display indicating that ceramics were important for the negotiation of status. The presence of female and animal figurines on the Acropoli Mediana (Figs. 3, 5:2), together with the style of the pottery (Fig. 5:3-5), is evidence of Mycenaean influence. Both the krater and the deep bowl are dependent on Mycenaean functional models and are signs of a substantial "Mycenaeanization" of the local material culture, perhaps as a result of a strategic and selective adoption of mainland elements by the Cretan elite to claim social authority and status. (9)