Revisiting the Prepalatial cemetery of Moni Odigitria, Crete: a reinterpretation of the existing funerary data through a combined materialistic, post-humanist, and cognitive theoretical framework.

Solomou, Anastasia
(2022) Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) 43 ‘Revolutions’, 2022 — Location: Edinburgh, United Kingdom (15.December.2022)

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The funerary landscape offers the richest dataset in Crete for the Early and part of the Middle Bronze Age (Legarra Herrero, 2014). Therefore, funerary data are key in the understanding of a context comprised of scarce evidence regarding other types of sites, such as settlements. Through this prism, I re-interprete the evidence from the Moni Odigitria cemetery from a perspective which removes focus and monopoly of agency from humans, ultimately achieving a better understanding of the material culture and its entanglement with those interacting with it. The approach used draws on sensoreality, material engagement and entanglement, and the way interactions between material culture and humans work to shape all constituents, human and non, bi-directionally (Hamilakis, 2013; Malafouris, 2013; Hodder, 2012; Malafouris and Renfrew, 2010). Intentionality and agency are viewed here as part -and product- of the process of material engagement, rather than qualities pertaining to humans or things (Malafouris, 2013).The at-first materialistic approach to the architecture, the pottery and the human remains iscoalesced in a discussion focusing on cognition, examining the way the material culture shaped the minds of those interacting with it. It is argued that the webs of entanglement of people, things, and the natural world at Moni Odigitria, formed multi-aesthetic, transtemporal experiences, generating powerful embodied memories, and structuring perceptions. These memories were sensorially evoked during subsequent visits to the tombs, and re-membered, re-collected, and consolidated (Scully et al., 2017; Nadel et al., 2012), and it is during this time that social roles could be re-negotiated.
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Solomou, A. (2022). Revisiting the Prepalatial cemetery of Moni Odigitria, Crete: a reinterpretation of the existing funerary data through a combined materialistic, post-humanist, and cognitive theoretical framework. Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) 43 ‘Revolutions’, 2022, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/271081