Complexity, power and "associations that matter" : rethinking social organisation in the Early Bronze Age 2 mainland Greece

The aim of this thesis is to introduce a new approach to the analysis of social organisation of the southern Greek Mainland during the Early Helladic II period. Central to this approach is a view of social organisation less as a "problem" faced by society and more as an open-ended project that involves defining particular networks of relationships as "associations that matter". From this point of departure, this thesis undertakes a novel analysis of domestic and monumental architecture (and their related artefactual assemblages), placing emphasis on the definition of contexts of practice where particular models of groupness were promoted and reproduced. The analysis establishes the "domestic" and the "public" as historically specific statements of belonging, firmly grounded in the ways specific activities, commensal events involving the sharing of a collectively procured produce, were structured.