COME, LET US EAT AND DRINK TOGETHER: FEASTING PATTERNS AND THEIR SOCIO-POLITICAL DIMENSIONS IN LATE BRONZE AGE EASTERN CRETE

Abstract

Feasts in Bronze Age Crete are an important manifestation of material culture. Indications of feasting can be identified in funerary, palatial, and domestic archaeological contexts. As a result of scholarship traditionally focusing on the religious character of funerary practices and palatial feasting, convivial activities within the domestic sphere have been neglected and/or misinterpreted. As a result of this research bias, there is a notable gap in the record of in-depth archaeological analysis of the social, political and ideological reasons of performing a feast in a domestic environment (or within the bounds of a settlement itself). Researchers have found it hard to distinguish between different types of feasts based on the associated cultural material, consequently leading to misinterpretations regarding the differences in feasting symbolism and the contribution of feasting to social organisation. The re-examination of published material from the Neopalatial (c. 1700‒1500/1450 BC or Middle Minoan IIIB‒Late Minoan IB in pottery terms) sites of Pseira, Mochlos and Gournia in eastern Crete reveals that specific patterns of feasts were in fact in existence and socially performed. Furthermore, the data suggest that feasts in settlements functioned as politically motivated rituals which played a leading role in the formation of social organisation through intra-community antagonisms.