Children Under the Floor: An Emotional Response to a Middle Helladic Burial Practice

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses the emotional context of child burials performed during the Middle Helladic period in houses still in use. Recent evidence, gained mainly from modern fieldwork, supports the reality of these interments, despite some counter-arguments raised based on the unorthodox location of them. Here, it is proposed that the cultural changes that occurred at the end of the Early Helladic period might have triggered sufficient psychological pressure that, in conjunction with the emergence of new societal forms, led communities to gradually accept this particular funerary practice, which had been rather marginal until then. Although the important role of metaphysical considerations is touched on here, a number of questions – primarily driven by an emotional approach – may reveal interesting paths for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Intramural
• stratigraphy
• kinship
• household
• anxiety
• regionality
• Argolid
• Marathon

Acknowledgements

Many thanks are owned to present directors of the Marathon excavation, Prof. Yiannis Papadatos and Prof. Giorgos Vavouranakis of the National and Kapodistrian University at Athens, for allowing me to present evidence from the fieldwork, before the final publication. As this paper was made feasible alongside my other research duties during my post-doctoral stay at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, I would also like to express my gratitude to Prof. Jan Driessen, Dr. Charlotte Langohr, and Dr. Sylviane Déderix for their generous support all of these years. Last but not least, many thanks to Dr. Don Evely for reading and correcting the manuscript, as well as to the editorial board and the reviewers for their fruitful comments. All shortcomings that remain are my own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).