Antonios Kotsonas

Anthropological and archaeological approaches to death and burial traditionally focus on corpses and human remains. Notwithstanding its importance, this normative approach overlooks the case of depositions which are located at burial sites and yield different objects, but very little, if any, human remains. Such depositions are known from across Eurasian prehistory and are attested sporadically in the historical and modern periods. I propose to approach this phenomenon through the excavation of body-less depositions at the burial site of Lyktos Alonas in Crete, Greece, ca. 600 BCE, and through the study of the natural or cultural site formation processes which shaped them. This study involves integrating new data from fieldwork and lab analyses, and evaluating it against current archaeological and anthropological approaches to such depositions, and against the rich textual and visual evidence on death, burial and the body in ancient Greece. The work is designed to address site-specific and culture-specific problems, but it is also conceived of as a methodological contribution which can transform established practices in the excavation and interpretation of body-less depositions, and it is intended to enrich the literature which problematizes the analytical categories of burial and grave, and the centrality of human remains in them.