Does anybody still wear that? Notes on (representations of) Minoan female dress in Mycenaean Greece
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-02-03

Minoan and Mycenaean wall-paintings, as most recently documented in B. R. Jones’ monographic study ‘Ariadne’s threads’,
form the most central category of evidence in reconstructing Aegean Bronze Age textiles and costumes. They are not, however,
without their own interpretative challenges, amongst which, particularly for Mycenaean mural art, a pronounced conservativism
is particularly noteworthy, as is, arguably as a collateral phenomenon, the occasional less-than-artful rendering of motifs when
a painter diverged from the templates of actual or conceptual pattern books. Judging the conservativism or innovative nature
of forms of dress from their representations in an inherently conservative medium may not, at first, seem the most promising of
approaches. It may, however, produce highly interesting results when evidence can be adduced that the conservativism of the
representation may have surpassed that of what was represented.
Precisely this may well be the case for Mycenaean representations of the traditional Minoan women’s dress of flounced skirt
and open-fronted bodice. While there is general agreement that it was borrowed as a complete package without any noticeable
selectivity on the part of the mainlanders and that it can be associated with ritual or festive occasions and possibly only with
wearers of a certain social status, there has been a long-lasting debate whether or not this female dress was actually still worn
on the mainland in the 13th century B.C. Its survival only in wallpainting iconography has been suggested as an alternative
explanation of the extant evidence, which has recently been complemented by important new wall-painting finds from the site
of Tiryns in the Argolid. These include, in at least one and possibly repeated instances, a very unusual rendering of the bodice,
which – unless it were explicable as a purely local form – provides a new vantage point to address an old and as yet unsolved
question in the proposed paper.

Author - Thaler, Ulrich, German Archaeological Institute, Athens, Greece (Presenting author)