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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > March/April 2001

Ideology from Artifacts

How ancient objects reveal the social reality of their time

By Bryan E. Burns

We tend to think of ancient objects as either useful or beautiful—or both. A bit of text scratched on a clay tablet is used to communicate or record information; a finely filigreed golden earring is thought to be lovely; an elegant stairway, perhaps leading into the adyton (inner chamber) of a temple, may be functional and pleasing to behold. But there is more to objects, ancient or modern, than utility or aesthetics. Things carry information about the world in which they were made; they are social messages given material form.1 The Statue of Liberty, for example, says a lot […]

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Footnotes

1.

The British archaeologist Arthur Evans found numerous Linear B tablets in his excavations at Knossos, on the island of Crete, some three decades earlier. Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland occupied Crete in the mid-second millennium B.C.

Endnotes

1.

Elizabeth DeMarrais, Luis Jaime Casillo and Timothy K. Earle, “Ideology, Materialization, and Power Strategies,” Current Anthropology 37 (1996), pp. 15–31.

2.

Iphiyenia Tournavitou, The “Ivory Houses” at Mycenae (London: British School at Athens, 1995), frontispiece, p. 498.

3.

The title is actually written wa-na-kai in the tablets, which is the Linear B spelling for the Greek wãnaj. In later Greek, ênaj generally meant “lord” and was used to denote divinities, heroes, and kings. For a comprehensive presentation of the Linear B tablets, see Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

4.

Christos Tsountas and J. Irving Manatt, The Mycenaean Age: A Study of the Monuments and Culture of Pre-Homeric Greece (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897), p. 12.

5.

Terence D’Altroy and Timothy K. Earle, “State Finance, Wealth Finance, and Storage in the Inka Political Economy,” Current Anthropology 26 (1985), pp. 187–206; and Paul Halstead, “The Mycenaean Palatial Economy: Making the Most of the Gaps in the Evidence,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 38 (1992), pp. 57–86.

6.

Thomas G. Palaima, ed., Aegean Seals, Sealings and Administration (Liège: Université de Liège, 1990).

7.

Ellen N. Davis, The Vapheio Cups and Aegean Gold and Silver Ware (New York: Garland, 1977).