Mycenaean ways of war : the past, politics, and personhood.

The remit of this thesis is to contextualise violence and martial culture in the
Mycenaean world in order to understand how it is a source of legitimacy for political
power during MH III-LH IIIB. A theoretical understanding of the way violence shapes
cultural conceptions of space and time supports this research, which is implemented
methodologically by a deconstruction of the loci in which violence and martial culture
are consumed in order to understand culturally specific meanings and codes of practice.
In part, this approach was implemented by a decision to weight the efforts to which the
Mycenaeans differentiate martial culture over relying on typological methods to
amalgamate.
Based on a contextualisation of the martial data from the Shaft Graves, this thesis argues
that violence is exploited at Mycenae in MH III-LH I in order to form a complex social
hierarchy that relies on the act of witnessing and approving of violence and the tuition
of bellicose practices for assimilation. The large numbers of swords deposited in the
later graves in Grave Circle B and Grave Circle A are argued to reflect hegemonic
integration rather than bilateral segregation of "elites" and "non-elites". Through LH II
there is general dispersion of the consumption of martial culture throughout the
Mycenaean world. In this context, death, violence and time are all heterarchical forces
that are empowered but also dominated as part of extended funerary rites. Personal
honour, orality and bellicosity are understood as mutually reinforcing cultural
expressions.
By LH IIIA, the threat of violence becomes more associated with liminal places in the
embedded landscape rather than with liminal periods of transition, namely death. The
metamorphosis is due in part to the presence of historical tombs as a critical element of
the political geography but also to the social pressures that proceed to rewrite concepts
of proximity during the Late Bronze Age. The Mycenaean response to this is to
reaffirm the importance of autochthony and homecoming by building settlement areas
and empowering them through confrontations with the threatening landscape. As
these processes intensify in LH IIIB, the palaces seek to legitimise themselves as loci of
production and consumption. In so doing, they co-opt and reinvent forms of violence,
including sacrificial and numinous acts, such as the funeral feast, that had hitherto been
primary components of the mortuary programme.