It is most likely during this period that Mycenaean ivory workers establish the fundamentals of their repertoire. Some of the innovations of the previous period do not see any follow-up; now new decors appear that will continue until the end of the palatial period.

In the context of globalization, post-modernity and transnationalism, identity, for most people, is no longer securely located in specific material environments. Yet the desire to 'ground' identity in place by acting in and on the material world remains, even as people shift between multiple locations. This chapter focuses considerson the materiality of identity, and on the relationship between agency, identity and place. It focuses particularly on place-based communities, for whom this relationship is fundamental, and who therefore exemplify the centrality of place in composing identity.

Unlike crete and the cyclades during the Neopalatial period, where palaces, grand villas, and towns offer a picture of intense and innovative activity, Helladic architecture remains poorly known – with the exception of burial monuments. Only a handful of settlements have been investigated, and these only partially (Darcque 2005, 395). On the Aspis hill at Argos, a position that controls the valley, buildings from the Middle Helladic (MH)/Late Helladic (LH) transition result in a rudimentary urban plan; a row of tripartite houses run along part of the hill (N. Papadimitriou et al., in Schallin and Tournavitou 2015, 163–84). Kolonna (Aegina) is a special case; much like Cycladic towns, the fortified town is extended at the very end of the MH period (W. Wohlmayr, in Felten 2007, 45–55), but it is not until the second half of the fifteenth century bc that the first substantial buildings appear.

In the aegean world, Mycenaean art is a new art. Unlike Minoan art, which developed over several centuries in the context of a palatial civilisation, it appeared suddenly c.1600 bc, in a Helladic world where works of art were previously extremely rare. Who were the artists and what were their sources of inspiration? How did it differ from contemporary Minoan (and Cycladic) art? The earliest works, the funerary riches from the period of the shaft graves of Mycenae, were displays of status on the part of elites with rapidly new-found wealth. Admittedly, such desire for status was already apparent since the Early Bronze Age in the jewellery from Minoan, Cycladic, or Helladic tombs.

The remodelling of the knossos palace, following the arrival of the Mycenaeans, goes hand in hand with the implementation of a new wall painting programme. Some frescoes from the previous period could perhaps have survived. Others, probably damaged, were removed from walls (two dumps have been found) and replaced with new ones. Hence the chronological differences between specialists, with some thinking that the frescoes in place at the time of the 1370 bc destruction date to the Knossian Mycenaean occupation, while others imagine them to be frescoes from the Neopalatial period. The large Procession fresco is a case in point.

It is likely that there was continuity in the pictorial tradition at Knossos before and after 1450 bc. According to M. Cameron’s classification (Evely 1999), the fresco painters (Groups E and G) would be the successors of those who painted the Partridge fresco (see above, p. 190).

Crowning plateaus or hilltops, close to the sea or inland, citadels are a characteristic feature of the Mycenaean landscape from the fourteenth century bc. With rare exceptions, fortified sites are absent from Crete (Nowicki 2000); only in the Cyclades, from the Early Bronze Age, has this type of landscape also featured.

On the mainland some sites, like those of Malthi and Peristeria in Messenia, and Araxos (Teichos Dymaean) in Achaea, still use Middle Bronze Age walls. These are simple enceintes of limited extent that protected the inhabitants from occasional attacks; the walls are built from blocks of varying sizes, supporting mudbrick courses above. Towards the beginning of Late Helladic (LH) I, new settlements are surrounded by heavily built walls, true refuge enclosures, both on the mainland (e.g. at Eutresis or Haghios Kosmas) and in the Cyclades (Haghios Andreas on Siphnos) and on Crete (Kastrokephala).

Cosmetic articles and boxes with ivory plaques are among the offerings deposited in tombs; seats, footstools, and tables inlaid with ivory are mentioned in the furniture inventories from Pylos (Poursat 1977b, 246). The material from the ‘Ivory Houses’ of Mycenae in particular, as well as the remains of workshops from Thebes or Tiryns, attest to the place of ivory working in palatial craft of this period (Tournavitou 1995; Polczyk and Krzyszkowska 2005, 191). The shapes and most of the decorative themes are the same as in Late Helladic (LH) IIB–IIIA1, the period when the ivory workers’ repertoire took shape. But the quality of pieces, the innovative variations on traditional subject matter, and the introduction of some new features all show that ivory as an artform is now fully developed.

Material culture studies have long incorporated analysis of domestic environments and dynamics of home in shaping culture, rituals of power, and more. This chapter examines the centrality of home, domestic environments, and communal living experiments to understanding people.

This chapter introduces readers to conceptions of matter and materiality that shape current conversations in material culture studies, sensitive to the rise of object biographies, commodity histories, fetishism, the new materialism, and the “multispecies” or “ontological” turn in anthropology.

This chapter examines the history of the concept of “aesthetics” across multiple disciplines. It concludes with recommendations for conceiving and investigating aesthetics as a cross-cultural endeavor that does not privilege Western ways of thinking about aesthetics and art.

The first structures of the aegean world follow techniques known over a huge geographical area; the simplest houses are oblong huts or four-sided houses with floors of beaten earth (Treuil 1983). Reconstructions of houses of this type have been proposed on the basis of remains founds at Achilleion in Thessaly, Nea Nikomedeia in Macedonia, and Nea Makri in Attica (AE1, fig. 1). They are made of posts connected by a horizontal wattle of branches covered in daub, and with a clay plaster which could take a coloured wash; they sometimes have one or two rows of posts at the interior (Perlès 2001, 173–99). The wattle and daub technique is almost exclusively found in the north (Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly) and slowly fades away through the course of the Neolithic.