You are all invited to the next online lecture hosted by the Irish Institute of Hellenic Studies at Athens. The lecture under the title “Context and Content: Rethinking the Poros Wall Hoard from Late Bronze Age Mycenae” by Dr Stephanie Aulsebrook (University of Warsaw), will take place on Thursday 23rd of November 2023 at 19.30 pm (Greece time)- 17.30 (Ireland time).
In order to attend the event, please register via EventBrite and you will receive a confirmation email with the relevant zoom link included: https://shorturl.at/jmsR0.
In case you face any difficulty, please contact us at [email protected].
Abstract
The phenomenon of hoarding metal artefacts in Bronze and Iron Age Europe has attracted much scholarly interest, generating fierce debates about their secular or ritual nature in particular. The Poros Wall Hoard, excavated at Mycenae in 1952, is one of five such groups of metalwork known from Late Bronze Age contexts at this site. Until a restudy of this hoard commenced in 2018, interpretations of its underlying meaning had centred on its contents; these had prompted its assignment to the category of “founder’s hoards”, that is to say a group of objects buried by a smith for safekeeping. The first stage of this restudy, focused on the context of the hoard, revealed mistakes in its publication had obscured important stratigraphic evidence that pointed to its deliberate inclusion within a landscape of ritual activity. In this presentation I will share the preliminary results of the ongoing second phase of this restudy, returning to the objects themselves. Detailed macroscopic analysis, aided by optical microscopy, uncovered information concerning the choice of objects and their treatment that, amongst other conclusions, also indicates the influence of ritual considerations on the actions associated with the deposition of this hoard.