Mortuary Variability and Social Diversity in Ancient Greece: Studies on Ancient Greek Death and Burial

Abstract

This volume is born out of the international workshop for early career scholars entitled ‘Mortuary Variability and Social Diversity in Ancient Greece’ that was held at the Netherlands Institute at Athens, Greece on December 1-2, 2016. The idea for this workshop stemmed from our mutual interest in ancient Greek death practices, and in understanding how the political, economic, and social realities that characterized Greek history related to funerary ideology and informed the ways in which the Greeks dealt with their dead. Two main questions are central to this problem: 1) how were local social structure and social roles – for example those the elderly or children, men or women, locals or migrants, or the poor or the wealthy – reflected in and motivated the way people were treated in death, and 2) how did large-scale developments such as political change and processes of ‘globalization’ influence death practice on the level of the individual, the social group, the local community, and the region.