Download or read book Feasting Practices and Changes in Greek Society from the Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age written by Rachel Sarah Fox and published by BAR International Series. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A feast is a sensory, sacralised and social occasion. Its multiple resonances and experiences extend far beyond the nutritive consumption of food and drink by a group of people. To understand a feasting event more comprehensively, it is necessary to analyse the whole series of experiences that the original participant would have undergone during the course of a feast, and to trace the footsteps of the diner through each stage of what was presumably a major event in his/her calendar. While the author examines the totality of feasting occasions in this book, her principal focus lies on how feasts serve as an arena for social negotiations: the creation of obligations to a powerful host, the cohesion augmented between companions, the privileging of high-status individuals, the emphasised inferiority of those of lesser status, and the creation of new connections through shared emotive experiences. This work thus explores on a broad scale the multi-faceted use of feasting in mainland Greece by placing it in a diachronic perspective, commencing at the beginning of the Early Mycenaean period (MHIII/LHI) and continuing to the end of the Early Iron Age (EIA). This long-range study is given focus by viewing it specifically from the angle of social changes, developments and negotiations, in order to analyse how socio-political events in Greece throughout the nine centuries under consideration both affected commensal events and were directly or indirectly produced by them.