The Longboat and Society in the Cyclades in the Keros-Syros Culture

Abstract

Recent work on Early Cycladic society and demography enables the role of the longboat in the Keros-Syros culture to be analyzed with a new precision. Considerations of community size are combined with the iconographic evidence for such vessels to support the possibly exclusive association of longboats with a small number of anomalously large settlements; the close link between longboat depictions and the Chalandriani cemetery is explored. It is argued that the context and associations of such depictions, combined with considerations of longboat design and the constraints on available manpower, militate against the likelihood that such vessels fulfilled a primarily trading role. Alternative functions (primarily coercive) are preferred and are integrated into a possible model for the growth of certain sites and the control of exchange during the period of the Keros-Syros culture. Available evidence indicates that the process of social change in the Cyclades during Early Bronze II displays important differences from contemporary processes elsewhere in the Aegean.

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