Conférence | Household Economics and Social Organization in Early Bronze Age Aegean

Lien zoom : https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/92823497692?pwd=kwfEuI7TZyfGb8XrzmJO71rxnplVP0.1 

The dawn of the Early Bronze Age in the Aegean (3,000–2,000 BCE) is a period when long-distance networks flourished and led to archaeologically well-attested evidence of social inequality. During the EBA 2 period, settlements became divided between the lower and upper towns, new drinking vessels and pottery shapes entered domestic repertoires, and the exchange of metals and other goods seemingly drove social change. However, less is known about the earliest phases of the EBA 1 (3,000–2,700 BCE). Based on household archaeology at Çukuriçi Höyük in western Anatolia/Türkiye and Platia Magoula Zarkou in Thessaly/Greece, the EBA 1 archaeological contexts were compared with cross-cultural ethnographic insights, to address households and socio-political organization at the dawn of the Bronze Age Aegean. The study showed that multiple modes of socio-political organization co-existed in time and space at the dawn of the Bronze Age in the region. These insights led to the development of a new interdisciplinary framework within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie X-KIN project, which explores prehistoric kinship from socio-cultural anthropological perspectives. Some preliminary insights from the X-KIN project will be introduced in the second part of the talk.

Biography

Sabina Cveček is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Field Museum in Chicago and the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Her research concerns contextualizing prehistoric households, kinship, and social organization in the eastern Mediterranean from socio-cultural anthropological perspectives. She holds PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Vienna (2021). Previously, she was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale and an IFK Junior Fellow at the International Research Centre for Cultural Studies in Vienna.