DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9189#0036
72
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PUB. UNIV. OF PA. MUSEUM, VOL. III.
A similar phenomenon moreover existed in all probability
in Greek lands. At five sites—Thorikos, Aphidna, Aigina,
Tiryns, and Arkesine on Amorgos—jar burials have been found
which in the opinion of their excavators date from the "premy-
cenaean" period.1
In the absence of full publications of the pottery found with
these burials, their date remains somewhat uncertain but it
seems probable that during the early bronze age, jars instead of
graves were occasionally used for burying the dead, at more than
one place on the Greek mainland.
All these graves were thought by M. Stais and by Dummler2
to be the graves of a people who were quite distinct, racially, from
the later Mycenaeans; they were called variously Carians,
Lycians and Pelasgians. M. Tsountas alone maintained the
opinion that a difference in burial did not necessarily imply a
difference in race. In its bearing on this question, the evidence
from Sphoungaras is apparently decisive, for it shows that the
highly developed Minoan civilization as well as the older and
more primitive societies of the mainland sometimes buried their
dead in jars. This cemetery, moreover, serves to connect such
earlier sporadic instances of burials under jars with the later
practices of the geometric period.
' For this list of pithos-burials I am indebted to Zehetmaier, Leichenverbrennung und Leichen-
verstaltung im alien Hellas, p. 43. For the few particulars which are given about these burials
see for those at Thorikos: 'E0. 'Apx-> 1895, p. 228 f; for those at Aigina where no pithoi were re-
covered but only the circular pits in which they had stood, id., p. 248; for those at Aphidna,
Athen. Mitt., 1896, p. 385 ff; for those at Tiryns and Arkesine on Amorgos, 'E0. Apx., 1898, p. 210.
2 Cf. also Perrot and Chipiez, Histoire de I'art, II, p. 373.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PUB. UNIV. OF PA. MUSEUM, VOL. III.
A similar phenomenon moreover existed in all probability
in Greek lands. At five sites—Thorikos, Aphidna, Aigina,
Tiryns, and Arkesine on Amorgos—jar burials have been found
which in the opinion of their excavators date from the "premy-
cenaean" period.1
In the absence of full publications of the pottery found with
these burials, their date remains somewhat uncertain but it
seems probable that during the early bronze age, jars instead of
graves were occasionally used for burying the dead, at more than
one place on the Greek mainland.
All these graves were thought by M. Stais and by Dummler2
to be the graves of a people who were quite distinct, racially, from
the later Mycenaeans; they were called variously Carians,
Lycians and Pelasgians. M. Tsountas alone maintained the
opinion that a difference in burial did not necessarily imply a
difference in race. In its bearing on this question, the evidence
from Sphoungaras is apparently decisive, for it shows that the
highly developed Minoan civilization as well as the older and
more primitive societies of the mainland sometimes buried their
dead in jars. This cemetery, moreover, serves to connect such
earlier sporadic instances of burials under jars with the later
practices of the geometric period.
' For this list of pithos-burials I am indebted to Zehetmaier, Leichenverbrennung und Leichen-
verstaltung im alien Hellas, p. 43. For the few particulars which are given about these burials
see for those at Thorikos: 'E0. 'Apx-> 1895, p. 228 f; for those at Aigina where no pithoi were re-
covered but only the circular pits in which they had stood, id., p. 248; for those at Aphidna,
Athen. Mitt., 1896, p. 385 ff; for those at Tiryns and Arkesine on Amorgos, 'E0. Apx., 1898, p. 210.
2 Cf. also Perrot and Chipiez, Histoire de I'art, II, p. 373.