Social bioarchaeological perspectives to the Minoan society: intersecting identities across time and space

Objective

This project explores aspects of social inequality and identity in one of the earliest complex societies in Europe, the Minoan society. Despite the volume of research on Minoan social organisation, complexity has mostly been investigated through the emergence of palatial centers and hierarchical relationships. BIOSOCIAL adopts a novel theoretical approach by emphasizing human agency and examining how identity categories intersected in lived experience. The main objectives of the project are: 1) To examine the relationship between funerary practices and social strategies in order to compare staged vs lived identities; 2) to explore patterns of inequality in disease, stress and diet in relation to sex, age and social status; 3) to assess whether biological affinity shaped mortuary practices and social relations, and 4) to identify mobility patterns and reconstruct interregional networks. To do so, the project applies an interdisciplinary and multi-proxy methodology. BIOSOCIAL will be the first systematic study to combine bioarchaeological, isotopic, biocultural, archaeothanatological, and theoretical approaches. These will be applied to over 200 human skeletons from two distinct sites, illuminating how human relations were formed and structured throughout the Early to Middle Bronze Age and across different regions. All raw data will be openly shared through an open access database while the project will result in the first extensive analysis of Neopalatial skeletal material, addressing a previously understudied period. The host institution will provide training in biodistance analysis and advanced statistics, while a secondment at VUB will expand the fellow's expertise in isotope analysis. By examining how Minoan communities structured social hierarchies, BIOSOCIAL will provide a historical perspective on the mechanisms that create and mitigate inequality, offering comparative insights relevant to contemporary debates on gender, migration, and social cohesion.