Abstract
From the start of the Late Bronze Age, people on the Greek mainland were buried with hundreds or even thousands of objects, made from exotic materials and embellished with figurative and abstract motifs. Through the twin representational strategies of figurative imagery and depositional practice, these assemblages effect a transformation from subject to object. This paper examines the nature of this transformation in more detail, focusing on the relations between bodies and objects within specific early Mycenaean burial contexts. It argues that the body (and in some cases, the person) becomes the image, centered around the material associations and relations of the assemblage. The dialectic between the real body (i.e. the corpse) and the represented body (i.e. the burial) therefore becomes an important axis of analysis for studies of the early Mycenaean mortuary sphere, which provides important insights into past concepts of the body and its association with the person.
