Cicek Beeby

CICEK BEEBY, then a graduate student at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was awarded a grant in April 2017 to aid research on ‘Spatial Narratives of Mortuary Landscapes in Early Iron Age Greece,’ supervised by Dr. Donald C. Haggis. This project reexamines the space and place of death in the early Greek city and city-state (polis). Previous studies on the topic have argued that burials were gradually pushed to the periphery of settlements in the 8th century BC during the formation of urban centers and city-states in Greece. Traditional models of Greek urbanism, therefore, paint a polarized view of urban spaces and maintain that in a typical Greek city, the boundaries between the dead, the living, and the divine were clear. Using a comprehensive GIS database that focuses on the burials of four Greek settlements (Athens, Argos, Corinth, and Eretria), this project reevaluates existing theories on changes to the configuration of cemeteries during the formative decades of Greek city-states. Preliminary results indicate that there is no wholesale shift in burial distribution that is shared by all major central Greek poleis in the 8th century BC. That is, the formation of the mortuary landscapes in the early Greek city does not conform to a monolithic response or a model that can be applied to all Greek communities. Instead, this study charts regional variations in the configuration of cemeteries during urbanization and state-formation in four different settlements.