This volume features a group of select peer-reviewed papers by an international group of authors, both younger and senior academics and researchers. It has its origins in a conference held at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, which aimed to bring up the frequently-neglected popular cult and other ritual practices in prehistoric and ancient Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. The topics covered by the chapters of the volume include the interplay between elite and popular ritual at cemeteries and peak sanctuaries just before and right after the establishment of the first palaces in Minoan Crete; the use of conical cups in Minoan ritual; the wide sharing of religious and other metaphysical beliefs as expressed in the wall-paintings of Akrotiri on the island of Thera; the significance of open-air sanctuaries, figurines and other informal cult and ritual paraphernalia in the Aegean, Cyprus and the Levant from the late bronze age to the archaic period; the role of figurines and caves in popular cult in the classical period; the practice of cursing in ancient Athens; and the popular element of sports games in ancient Greece.

This book examines the application of these ideas to Bronze Age burials in east Crete, in order to examine the historical significance of a specific pattern of changes in funerary monumentality. Within the Early Bronze Age landscape, tombs built above the ground were monumental landmarks. Such monumentality was lost during the Middle -Late Bronze Age period, when the dead were usually buried underground or in caves. At the same time, the living made their presence increasingly marked in the landscape, with the erection of 'palaces' and 'villas' and the formation of nucleated settlements. Finally, the re-emergence of burials in the landscape during the Late Minoan III period, albeit in the form of modest semi-subterranean chambers, coincides with a fragmentation of large urban settlements and a return to modest-sized communities. An examination of funerary activity from a landscape perspective can provide a better understanding of the relationship between funerary monumentality and socio-historical process and also the ways in which this relationship was expressed in the landscape.