SOCIAL AND GENDER INEQUALITY IN EARLY IRON AGE GREECE

Social and gender inequalities are usually thought to be reflected in the material culture of Early Iron Age Greece as footprints of kings, aristocrats, warriors, traders, princesses and priestesses. Such simplistic perceptions of Greek societies’ structuring not only downplay their complexity but also obscure their uneven evolution over time and space. This symposium wishes to examine social relations from a perspective that is embedded in social and anthropological theory and is informed about social inequality and reproduction. The objective is to highlight regional variabilities in social organisation through the integration of macro and micro scale approaches and to explore the interaction among different social systems within Greece and beyond it. We wish thus to examine why and how certain societies operated with different degrees and forms of inequality that may have been manifested through more or less egalitarian or ranked social systems. For this reason studies that discuss regional differentiations in a comparative manner are particularly encouraged.