Living with the past: settlement mobility and social memory in Early Bronze Age Mesara

The settled landscape of Early Bronze Age Mesara is dominated by the widespread presence of circular tombs which, being used for communal burials over many generations, have traditionally been taken to suggest residential stability. A thorough reading of their discontinuous sequences of use, coupled with a deeper understanding of their surrounding territories, has more recently clarified that these tombs were used episodically by different kin-based groups, i.e. by groups who practiced a mobile way of life and through changing their locus of habitation needed some form of territorial foci to legitimate their control over productive resources in their vicinity. In this paper, building on the results of recent geo-morphological studies, it will be argued (a) that residential mobility was more accentuated in the western part of the plain, where Phaistos and Ayia Triada are located, because the delta of the Geropotamos had created an unstable marshy wetland that was far from ideal for permanent settlement; (b) that the mechanism that allowed people to move around in the territory was the re-use of the past; and (c) that discontinuity of occupation did not prevent continuity in the functional destination of certain areas thanks to specific strategies that were aimed at constructing a collective memory that transcended the biological life of the participants. The latter aspect will be addressed by using the data offered by Ayia Triada, which was discontinuously occupied from EM I to LM IIIC. More specifically, it will be argued that the ritual usage of the area where an open shrine was created in LM IIIC, was established in EM I, when the debris of a large scale consumption episode performed on the occasion of the foundation of the site was discarded and kept in situ by a low wall, which led to the formation of a tumulus.