October 17: Lecture by Philipp W. Stockhammer

Family, Food and Health in the Bronze Age Aegean: 
Novel Bioarchaeological Insights into Mycenaean and Minoan Societies

Since the famous excavations of Heinrich Schliemann in Mycenae and of Arthur Evans in Knossos, we have been trying to understand the life of the Mycenaean and Minoan societies of the second millennium BCE. Outstanding palaces, literary sources and rich burials have inspired our fascination of the Aegean Bronze Age. However, many basic questions have remained unanswered: How were families structured? What about individual mobility in the Aegean? Did people move from Anatolia to the Aegean or from Mainland Greek to Crete? What about their food and health? Now, a plethora of bioarchaeological approaches from archaeogenetics to the study of food residues in human dental calculus opens up new horizons of knowledge. Within my European Research Council project “FoodTransforms” and at the Max Planck Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean, we have now assembled a bioarchaeological dataset of the Aegean Bronze Age, which enables novel insights into Bronze Age marital rules, biological relationships in collective burials, human mobility, culinary practices, resource management and infectious diseases in the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC Aegean. I will present these datasets and integrate them into our rich archaeological evidence in order to shed a new light on Mycenaean and Minoan societies.

(International Archaeology Day Event)

October 17 at 3:00 pm
✎ Webinar Registration Required (click here)