8. Continuity and commemoration
MONUMENTS, THE SACRED, AND SACRED
LAND IN THE NORTH AEGEAN
As Jeremy McInerney has underscored in his recent study of cattle in
Greek culture, sanctuaries were,first and foremost,temene;lands‘cut out’
from other ground, not least to ensure the maintenance of sanctuary assets
(including sacrificial animals), but also to distinguish sacred land from
other kinds, whether we call them profane, collective, or private land.^1 The
evidence for north Aegean sacred spaces is rather more opaque than what
we know of sanctuaries in central and much of southern Greece. One of
the unexpected discoveries about social behaviour in the pre-imperial
northern Aegean is the variety of monumental structures that have a
sacred character. Burial sites and sacred areas do not seem to have the
distinct typologies in the north that they had in central and southern
Greece. This has implications for how we think about the application of
the termtemenosin these regions, but also how we consider the abstract
understanding and use of resources in these northern societies.
In the northern Aegean the historical mechanisms by which land was
designated‘sacred’are both similar to and different from other parts of the
Greek peninsula. The problem of sacred land is rendered more complex
than elsewhere in the Aegean because there was a relationship between, on
the one hand, sacred places intended for collective assembly and perform-
ance, and, on the other, those associated with mortuary structures. What is
more, tombs often look like cult buildings and are consciously grounded in
particular landscapes. The custom of building earthen mounds for the
dead was a process that united them with the land in a unique way.
Mounds occupy many times more space than a simple earth-cut pit or
cist and construction took this space out of agricultural use. Surviving
(^1) McInerney 2010, 147.