This uncertainty largely derives from problems of interpretation which follow changes in burial customs. The widespread (although far from universal) fashion for single burial from Late Helladic IIIC onwards, ending multiple interments in chamber tombs or, for the elite, tholoi, and sometimes involving the complete abandonment of earlier cemeteries, was in many areas accompanied, or rapidly followed by, a wholesale shift from inhumation to cremation (Lemos 2002: ch. 5). Cremation had been practiced at various stages of the Bronze Age, but was now favored on an unprecedented scale (Stampolidis 2001). As has commonly been observed, the relative frequency with which favored rites changed through the Early Iron Age precludes a primarily religious explanation: surely more significant was the social capital to be gained from the spectacle and investment involved in a key rite of passage (Morris 1987: chs. 3, 8). Cremation dealt in spectacular fashion with the perishable body, and facilitated conspicuous consumption of other offerings. It thus gave scope to prolong celebrations at the grave, and to draw greater attention to the deceased and his family, which was fully exploited in the succeeding centuries as tumuli and/or grave markers became ever larger and more elaborate. The richness of the warrior cremation in the central shaft of the Toumba building at Lefkandi (ca. 950) is a case in point (see below). Usually, the major loss resulting from a switch to single burial is that of the physical association of individuals in shared family or kin-group tombs. In some regions, multiple burials survived or were revived for varying reasons. For example, the cemetery at Elateia in Phocis may have reached a peak of wealth in the immediate post-palatial period, but new if smaller chamber tombs continued to be built into Protogeometric and beyond, and remained in use even longer (Dakoronia 1993a). At Argos, the appearance of ever-larger cist tombs with multiple burials in the eighth century probably indicates renewed emphasis on lineage among the elite (Hagg 1983a; Foley 1988: 35-40). And perhaps most strikingly, at Knossos the long-term use of chamber tombs and shaft graves in the North Cemetery allows us to reconstruct patterns of inherited rights and custom, such as the right to be buried with weaponry (Cavanagh 1996; Snodgrass 1996). In regions such as Macedonia, Epirus and Thessaly, the continuing popularity of tumuli through the Early Iron Age and beyond is usually taken to represent long-lived kin associations. This may be so, although usually only small parts of very extensive cemeteries have been excavated, and recent discoveries in Thessaly in particular have shown differences in age/sex representation, offerings, and spatial arrangements of graves within individual tumuli which imply that they could contain different forms of group. A good, archaic, example of this is an apparent military association at Ag. Giorgios near Larisa (Tziaphalias 1994).
Nonetheless, in most parts of the southern mainland in particular, addressing questions of inherited versus acquired power demands that we identify and interpret spatial associations between single burials and where possible, correlate their pattern of offerings. The existence of family burial plots has been claimed at a number of sites, and certain examples predate the eighth century (Lemos 2002: 187-8). A small early/mid-ninth century grave group on the north slope of the Areiopagus in Athens, for example, has been tentatively identified as the family plot of the Medontid genos.6 This includes the grave of the “Rich Lady” (ca. 850) whose 81 offerings included a variety of orientalia, and a ceramic chest with five granary models on the lid which likely symbolizes one source of family wealth (another being the eastern trade discussed below). Most groups, however, date from the eighth century onwards, when new burial plots appear, pressure on space made the preferential use of certain parts of existing cemeteries (such as the Athenian Kerameikos) an important issue, or when the laying out of whole new cemetery areas (as at Eretria) allows us to trace contemporary perceptions of who belonged where. Such groupings vary in strength, and their interpretation as direct representations of family or genos is controversial. Certainly, it is a further step to see them as simple precursors of archaic and classical groups which present their own difficulties in interpretation (Houby-Nielsen 1995). In the Athenian Kerameikos, for example, there is clear variation in the ties between the burial groups represented in the great Archaic tumuli, and, for example, the largely male dead in Grave-mound G and the South Mound who shared the symposiastic aspects of the luxurious, Lydianizing lifestyle of tryphe (Houby-Nielsen 1995: 152-63). The ties symbolized here span the range of elite male activities, from kinship to warfare and drinking and dining associations - the public virtues which played such an important part in constructing the reputation of the good aristocrat. For the Early Iron Age, however, we still lack the large multi-period sample from any region necessary to put such expression into context.
World History
