of attacks by wild animals, rather than the scarcity of sacrificial beasts.
The need to provide protection for comparatively isolated inland com-
munities, separated from one another by forests, explains the central
importance of training a corps of young men in horsemanship and
country pursuits. Funerary images and artefacts in graves strongly reflect
the social significance of those who bore responsibility for protecting
settled populations engaged in other pursuits. Besides providing protec-
tion from scavengers and occasional large predators, leadership carried
the more basic duty of affirming social order and encouraging cordial
relations. Michael Dietler has explained how alcoholic beverages could
have reinforced positive social messages in southern Gaul, and more
generally among south-western and central European societies, particu-
larly when these came into contact with Phoenician and Greek traders.
Commensality, or collective dining, was one of the key ways in which
members of ancient communities affirmed mutual ties, but also
cemented new ties, whether with merchants or with other visitors.^16
The mass adoption of various forms of drinking equipment was partly
motivated by the recognition that exotic vessels, as well as the beverages
for which they were designed, enabled social relationships to be seen in
new ways. Royal, princely, and communal dinners put an onus on
leaders as hosts, but these investments bore fruit when communities
thrived as a result. Funerary furniture and decoration in the northern
Aegean is much preoccupied with dining. In part this refers to
the imagined dinners of an otherworldly afterlife; but the afterlife is
imagined using the artefacts that the deceased would have been
familiar with.
What concerns us here is the economic significance of those acts of
mortuary differentiation between rulers and their ilk on the one hand,
and other inhabitants, whether citizens or subjects, on the other. The
social distinctions that put some individuals into special categories and
not others did not just apply to kings. Queens, princes, senior officers,
priests, and priestesses should also be included among those accorded
distinctive obsequies. Age classes might also be expected to feature in
some way in the grammar of mortuary practice, in the same way that
their status was recognized in different forms of dress, footwear, and
headgear in life. In this respect, Thracian rulers and others in Thrace
fulfilling important public roles, female as well as male, enjoyed a similar
social distinction to that held by their Macedonian peers. Mortuary
rituals therefore deserve closer attention.
(^16) Dietler 1990; 1999; 2009; 2011; Dietler and Herbich 2001.
Continuity and commemoration 305