Telling Stories: The Mycenaean Origins of the Philistines

The story of the Philistines as Mycenaean or Aegean migrants, refugees who fled the Aegean after the collapse of the palace societies c.1200 BC, bringing an Aegean culture and practices to the Eastern Mediterranean, is well known. Accepted as essentially true by some, yet rejected as little more than a modern myth by others, the migration narrative retains a central place in the archaeology and historiography of the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age (LBA/EIA). In recent years, and despite an increasingly shaky theoretical basis, the migration hypothesis has nevertheless seemed to drown out other interpretations and characterizations of the period, claiming a normative position that is undeserved. In this paper I explore the continuing power of this nineteenth century narrative and seek to show why it is less convincing than its prominent status would suggest.     

Western utopianism/dystopianism and the political mediocrity of critical urban research

This paper seeks to summarise the interplay between utopian and dystopian thinking throughout the twentieth century with a particular focus on the city. The gradually shrinking appeal of the socialist utopia and its replacement with the globalised free–market as a 'revanchist utopia' left socialist utopian thinking in a state of disarray towards the end of the previous century. Utopian thinking, both as a literary and political genre has been rendered marginal in contemporary political practices. Urban dystopia, or 'Stadtschmerz', is now prevalent in critical Western thinking about city and society. It is concluded that the declining political impact of critical urban research is caused partly by its lack of engagement with crafting imaginative alternative futures for the city. The works by Sennett, Sandercock and the Situationists, among others, may contain elements to reverse the current utopian malaise in urban research.     

I Will Follow You into the Dark: Death and Emotion in a Mycenaean Royal Funeral

Despite many years of intensive research into burial and funeral practices in Late Bronze Age (LBA) Greece, emotion remains largely absent from the discussion. Yet death and the emotions it provoked would have been familiar aspects of daily life in Mycenaean Greece. The dead had to be dealt with and moved on through various rites until they became a safe part of the landscape and memory of individuals and communities. In addition to anthropological and psychological research on death and grieving, we have several categories of evidence that can allow us a glimpse of the emotional world of death in LBA Greece: the Homeric poems the Iliad and Odyssey, iconographical representations of death, funeral practices and mourning, and the archaeological material itself – the tombs and offerings. In this paper, I introduce the various categories of evidence and draw on them to support an imaginative reconstruction of an event that happened, but which is not recorded in any historical sources – the death and burial of a great king of Mycenae. I argue that using emotion as a lens through which to view the evidence can sometimes allow deeper interpretation and enable fuller historical reconstructions of lived lives and experiences.