Burial Mounds and “Ritual Tumuli” of the Aegean Early Bronze Age

Résumé En

The appearance of the first burial mounds in the Aegean in the Early Helladic period is a very limited phenomenon compared to their widespread distribution in Southeast Europe during the same period. It seems necessary, therefore, to approach it within an interpretative framework on a scale broader than the exclusively local or regional. It is actually widely accepted that, in spite of cultural specificity, EH II Greece shared basic features with its Mediterranean and Balkan neighbours, such as the climate, the development of seafaring and the quest for metals, which all impacted upon society, including in the field of burial customs. In this paper, the current state of research regarding the likely origin of the Helladic burial mounds is briefly presented. It is suggested that the chronological and typological heterogeneity of the corpus should be taken into account to trace the ancestry of the EH mounds; in particular, differences in the spatial organization of the cemeteries and the burial rites should lead us to question the link between the EH II burial mound cemetery on Lefkas and the other EH II-III burial mounds of Greece. The relationship between burial and non-burial mounds is further examined and it is argued that the primary function of mounds, and their common denominator, was that of monuments in the etymological sense (lat. monumentum), the memorial role of which helps to account for several aspects of the present set of data.