Talismanic Practice at Lefkandi: Trinkets, Burials and Belief in the Early Iron Age

Abstract

Excavations at Lefkandi have dispelled much of the gloom enshrouding the Early Iron Age, revealing a community with significant disposable wealth and with connections throughout the Mediterranean. The eastern imports in particular have drawn scholarly attention, with discussion moving from questions of production and transportation to issues surrounding consumption. This article draws attention to some limitations in prevalent socio-political explanations of consumption at Lefkandi, arguing that models relying on gift-exchange, prestige-goods and elite display cannot adequately account for the distribution, chronology, find context and function of imports at Lefkandi. A study of trinkets – small but manifestly foreign imports of cheap material – offers a new perspective. An analysis of their form, context, use and meaning demonstrates that trinkets were meaningfully and deliberately deposited with children as talismans or amulets. Talismanic practice had Late Bronze Age precedents, and in the Early Iron Age was stimulated from personal contact with the Near East or Cyprus and nurtured by the unique mortuary landscape at Lefkandi. This article demonstrates the need for archaeologists to treat mortuary beliefs as a meaningful explanatory variable. Moreover, the ability of non-elite objects to convey powerful ideas has important implications for the nature and dynamics of artistic and cultural exchanges between Greece and the East in the Iron Age.

Societies in Transition in Early Greece

“…The context and particularity of objects must be examined as well. In the case of Lefkandi, several of the exotica found in Early Iron Age tombs are best described as trinkets, talismans, or amulets, which Arrington (2016) has argued represent multiple eschatological belief systems within a mixed community of locals and foreigners, tracing some particularities to Cypro-Phoenician traditions; Murray (2018a) has made a similar argument concerning the LH IIIC cemetery at Perati. Various modes of signification were therefore present in the Toumba 9.…”

Heirloom or Antique? Import or Imitation? Objects with Fictive “Biographies” in Early Iron Age Knossos

“…One should also consider religious affinities between the Aegean and the Near East. According to Arrington (2016), Near Eastern scarabs and small finds discovered in EIA graves at Lefkandi could have functioned as trinkets and amulets for those who buried in a cemetery not necessarily reserved for the local elite (Arrington 2016, 23). He suggests that "it was a burial ground for multiple families marked by immigration and marriage across cultural divides and holding varying views of death and burial ritual" (Arrington 2016, 23).…”