UC Berkeley

Terracotta figurines of humans and animals, in their ubiquity and uniformity, have become quite emblematic of Mycenaean culture and civilization. Their schematic, but evocative forms have captured academic and public imagination since their discovery in the late nineteenth century. Ever since then, we have tended to associate figurines with ancient religious practices. In our attempt to work out their exact relationships to ancient deities, archaeologists have constructed rigorous typologies and meticulous catalogues, but we have yet to hit upon their specific role in Mycenaean religion or society. We know even less about the circumstances of their creation or about how they were used by the people who acquired them. My dissertation introduces a collection of recently excavated and unpublished legacy examples of terracotta figurines from the LH IIIA2 Petsas House ceramic workshop at Mycenae. This collection is important because it reveals new information about how figurines were made and by whom. It also offers an opportunity to trace the decisions made by craftspeople back to the consumers who selected and used figurines in graves and sanctuaries.

The first half of this project presents the collection of over 1,100 figurines from the Petsas House workshop. The corpus includes female and bovine terracottas in great quantity, but also smaller numbers of furniture models, other animals, and combinations of humans and animals. With some exceptions, most figurines were newly made, like the other pottery products in the shop. That is, they comprise part of the production output of the locale, not part of an active domestic or religious installation. The Petsas House collection demonstrates how female and bovine terracottas were systematically standardized for high-volume production while other types required more time and labor investment. The ability of craftspeople to both conform and create when making figurines reveals that they were both skilled and specialized in their endeavors to meet customer demands.

The second half of the dissertation explores how and why customers were making those demands. Death and burial in chamber tombs were one social practice which motivated the production of terracotta figurines at Mycenae. On the island of Aegina, new commodities and social practices (including burial) were actively being adopted in LH IIIA2 – the same period of time in which the Petsas House workshop was in operation – and locals both imported figurines from Mycenae and emulated them in local workshops for use in those new settings. On the Methana peninsula, the settlers at Agios Konstantinos had very specific ideas about which types of figurines were appropriate for their local religious and burial traditions. My project concludes by bringing together the observations made about figurine production at Petsas House and consumption in graves and sanctuaries. Instead of relying on the long-standing tradition of interpreting figurines as focal points of cult and goddess worship, I restore creative agency to their makers and powers of decision-making (individual and collective) to their users. Figurines may well have been ideologically charged objects, but they were also commodities embedded in the same socioeconomic transactions that motivated the exchange of goods, ideas, and even people.