Set in stone? Technical, socio-economic and symbolic considerations in the construction of the Cyclopean-style walls of the Late Bronze Age Citadel at Tiryns, Greece

Abstract

Western views about both human and material resource usage dominate how we tend to believe that these were employed in the past too. In particular, non-western communities, just as certain past societies, often do not see minerals and, therefore, stones as exploitable commodities or passive materials to be manipulated for pure economic or utilitarian reasons, as we most often do. Stones may carry deeply interwoven symbolic meanings linked to their ritual powers as well as their economic, material, social, cosmological, mythical, spiritual aspects of life. This paper explores the nature of the stones employed in the various sections of the Tiryns citadel over time, and their multiple meanings as building materials and markers of social practices played out by the inhabitants of Tiryns in and with their socio-political landscape. Through the reassessment of geological and other literature on the topic of Tirynhian building stones, it is revealed how stones were very specifi cally chosen for various properties and reasons. These specifi c stone choices in terms of both their properties and their locations show conscious actions of creating and maintaining social memories of Tiryns’ Early Bronze Age ‘Rundbau‘ users, inhabitants, workers, builders and elite, thus linking themselves to a deep ancestral past through the long-term building efforts conducted during the Late Bronze Age. At the same time, it is argued that the stones chosen brought the local surrounding landscape together in one building complex in order to indicate, confi rm and negotiate socio-political alliances between groups present in and near Tiryns, and that in a period during which Mycenae must have played an overall dominant political role in the region, a factor also played out in the stone use at Tiryns. I argue that both local and regional strategies embedded in the stones are not competing with each other but can be manipulated and played out at the same time for different but complementary reasons.