Events Calendar – British School at Athens

Upper House Seminar

Dr Jan Sienkiewicz (University of Cambridge/British Museum/BSA), “Islands Between Palaces: The ‘Mycenaean’ Civilisation Reconsidered”

Abstract: According to the dominant scholarly narrative, after the collapse of the Neopalatial civilisation, the Aegean societies underwent the so-called ‘Mycenaeanisation’, as the regional centre of cultural, economic, and political influence shifted from ‘Minoan’ Crete to the ‘Mycenaean’ southern Greek mainland. This narrative, however, has been shaped by the insistence, imposed partly by the inherently interpretative label ‘Mycenaean’, to equate the presence of specific types of material culture (mostly pottery and certain tomb types) with cultural practices and identities of mainland Greek origins. This paper offers a retelling of Aegean prehistory in the Late Bronze Age (c. 1600 – 1100 BCE), which came out of asking not who people were but what they did – focusing not on unknowable identities but on archaeologically attestable practices. Using island communities of the south-east Aegean as a case study, this paper argues that we need to decouple trade networks from networks of socio-cultural interaction, showing how these two do not necessarily overlap. It demonstrates how in different but interconnected communities the same practices involved pottery of different styles, cautioning against equating objects with cultural behaviour and identities. Finally, it is argued that Crete was central to the cultural changes conventionally associated with ‘Mycenaeanisation’.

Bio: Dr Jan Sienkiewicz is the Richard Bradford-McConnell Fellow at the BSA for 2025-26. Jan works on museum collections, funerary archaeology, Aegean prehistory, and theories of culture change. He came to the BSA to begin publishing the findings of his doctoral research, which began as a collaboration between the British Museum and the University of Cambridge, set up to re-examine the material from the 19^th century excavations of the Late Bronze Age chamber tomb cemetery at Ialysos on Rhodes. In addition to recontextualising museum objects and reconstructing original assemblages of grave goods from this important site, Jan’s research focused on tracing networks of social interaction and cultural affiliation between island communities of the southern Aegean. Before his PhD in ‘Mycenaean’ Archaeology at Cambridge, Jan studied at the University College London, where he obtained an MA in Mediterranean Archaeology and a BA in Classical Archaeology, with both his MA and BA dissertations focusing on ‘Minoan’ Crete. In addition to his academic pursuits, as a retired rower, Jan is an avid hiker and runner, with keen interest in science of sport and nutrition, which somehow does not conflict with his even keener interest in custard-based desserts.

image: courtesy of J. Sienkiewicz

Hybrid lecture

To attend in person in Athens, please register here

To attend online via webinar, please register here