School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemBotanic motifs of the Bronze Age Cycladic Islands: identity, belief, ritual and trade( 2019)Botanic motifs of the Bronze Age Cycladic Islands: Identity, Belief, Ritual and Trade Marcia Nugent, University of Melbourne This thesis argues the motifs with which we surround ourselves signify something – about us, our identities, our values and our understanding of the world. Frequently and infrequently represented motifs tell us something about the culture from which they come. Assemblages of motifs from different peoples and places tell us something about the people who created and viewed them – their preferences and their sense of place in their environment. In short, motifs have meaning. Although in many cases the original viewer may have assigned non-intrinsic meaning to motifs, patterns of representation and placement and the context of motifs can allow the uninitiated to recognise meaning. Motifs can communicate feelings, ideas, beliefs, practice and uses of the items represented to observers far removed from the original intended viewers. Since prehistoric times, the natural world has been a focus of human artistic endeavour. From before people first settled and started practicing agriculture, plants have been important sources of shelter, nourishment and clothing materials. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that plants feature in early artistic representations. The artistic record reflects our early and continuing inextricable link to our natural environment. Our reliance on plant products makes botanic motifs an important subset of the iconographic record. The temporal and geographical focus of this study is the Bronze Age period (approx. 3000 – 1200 BC) of three sites from the Cycladic Islands, a group of islands in the Aegean Sea north of Crete – Akrotiri (Thera), Ayia Irini (Kea) and Phylakopi (Melos). Motifs are frequently from the Late Bronze Age period (1600 – 1200 BC), but some motifs are first seen and traced from the Early and Middle Bronze Age periods. The thesis seeks to answer two broad research questions: 1. Which plants were represented at the Bronze Age Cycladic Islands of Melos, Thera and Kea and how were they represented? 2. What can the context, form and associations of the botanic motifs tell us about the identity, beliefs, rituals and trade of the people that created and viewed them? Although a number of scholars have undertaken broad iconographic studies and other research has considered a limited assemblage of plant motifs, none have focused only on the three Cycladic Island sites featured in this study. This thesis also uniquely applies a quantitative and contextual analysis to over 500 botanic motifs to understand broader qualitative archaeological problems. The newly developed analytical methodology of this thesis intends to extend a replicable, scientific approach reaching from a quantitative, numbers based analysis to qualitative analysis utilising theoretical frameworks, enabling a post-processual, post-structuralist, contextualised study of the botanic motifs. The study ultimately reveals botanic motifs and the plants they represent have an entangled relationship with humanity, built on dependency and co-dependency, which support and enhance the economic, health and spiritual lives of the people of the Bronze Age Cycladic Islands.
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ItemMinoan stone vessels with Linear A inscriptions( 2011)Minoan stone vessels with Linear A inscriptions are ritual vessels whose stone and inscriptions denoted the permanence of the dedicants’ devotion. The vessels were dedicated to deities, and were used in a variety of Minoan rituals, some of which can be tentatively reconstructed. Most of the vessels come from peak sanctuaries, the most important of which probably doubled as observatories for marking the passage of the equinoxes and solstices; thus the concentration of inscribed vessels at these sites suggests that the vessels played a part in seasonal rituals whose timing was determined by the sun and moon. The seasonality of these rituals suggests that they were focused on aspects of the cycle of life: fertility, birth, death and renewal. However, offerings left with the vessels also suggest that people visited these sanctuaries for other, more personal reasons—for example, to give thanks for good fortune, to request healing, or to seek divine protection before a dangerous journey. Inscribed stone vessels may have played a part in any of these rituals. A smaller number of inscribed stone vessels come from Kato Syme, a very important shrine built high on a flank of Mt Dikte, on the spot where a perpetual spring issues from the mountain. This spring is an important water source for the valleys and arable lands below; thus the location of the sanctuary again suggests that the inscribed vessels found there were used in rituals focussed on the divine source(s) of fertility. Most inscribed stone vessels can be interpreted as receptacles for liquid and/or solid offerings. The so-called Minoan ‘ladles’ are a special case: I interpret them as pouring vessels meant to be held in cupped hands. Iconographic evidence suggests that ‘ladles’ may have been used in male maturation rites. Though Linear A remains undeciphered, linguistic analysis of the inscriptions on the vessels is still possible on several fronts. Clues to the phonology of Minoan can be found in the structure of Linear A itself, and in the way in which it was borrowed by the Mycenaeans to create Linear B. Mycenaean spellings of Minoan words and names also contain clues as to the sounds of Minoan, while alternating Classical spellings of some Minoan words suggest that Minoan had some sounds that were not native to Greek. The morphology of Minoan can be investigated through statistical analyses of the frequency with which the various Linear A signs occur. Inflection in human languages usually involves affixes; thus signs that appear inordinately often at the beginnings or ends of Linear A words are likely to be prefixes and suffixes. Finally: most inscribed Minoan stone vessels contain a version of the so-called ‘Libation formula’, a lengthy sequence of Minoan words; comparing these versions yields valuable clues about the nature of Minoan syntax. The results of these investigations suggest that Minoan is a non-Indo-European, non-Semitic language with a fairly standard set of phonemes, an agglutinative morphology incorporating both prefixes and suffixes, and (possibly) VSO word order.