"Sun, Sea And Spirals: Early Cycladic Frying Pans"
Creators: name: Nuttall, Christopher
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2016
Subjects: Cycladic Archaeoogy, Cyclades, Material Culture,

description: "Sun, sea and spirals: early Cycladic frying pans". Thursday 26th May 2016. Whirls in Greek thought and beyond. Transdisciplinary workshop, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University.

Cycladic frying pans have proven to be something of an enigma, generating considerable discussion as to their usage and meaning. In this talk given at a workshop in Uppsala titled “Whirls in Greek thought and beyond”, the aesthetics and societal context of frying pans at Chalandriani were reviewed, before some analysis of their role in Cycladic society was ventured. The interplay between marine representation and female genitalia on frying pans raises a series of important issues. Frying pans have been described as fertility charms, representing the womb of a ‘great goddess’ and linked to fertility. They have also been linked to male sexuality and raiding via the sea, however they carry no depictions of violence or conflict. There seems a plausible case for the frying pans being representative of a womb, not least due to the presence of genitalia, but also in the shape of the vessels. Interaction via the sea for exogamy would have been essential to the continuity of Cycladic communities, so a link between the sea and fertility is understandable. <br>
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The deposition of frying pans take place in a mortuary context, so what can be made of the potential link between fertility, the sea and death? For a maritime society, it is not difficult to view death as being ‘watery journey’. Later Greek belief and ethnographic examples highlight how the sea as a space can be linked to death. The combination of maritime scenes on vessels deposited in tombs suggests a conscious desire to situate the dead within a seascape brought onto the land. If the sea was conceptualized as a liminal space linked to death, then the fact that some seafarers could negotiate this space, visiting foreign lands,obtaining exotic knowledge and goods and then return unharmed, may bestow significant social capital to those individuals. If these individuals were figuratively sailing through a “deathscape” then the social capital generated by these individuals could be potentially huge. Especially as tomb assemblages suggest a conscious intent to modify bodily appearances, with obsidian for shaving and scarification, and pigment for tattooing. Not only could the bodies of seafarers have been visually different, but their bodies may have carried symbolic associations with the seascape.<br>
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The sea was significant in fertility, whether as an active constituent or simply the medium through which people interacted and exchanged marriage partners. The sea was also an important source of social capital and identity in life, and links to the sea were deployed in sea motifs in a funerary context. Could the mixing of the different spheres of the seascape and fertility in the context of mortuary practices be linked to a belief in the sea as a medium for rebirth? I.e. the belief in the sea as both the starting point and ending point for the souls of the unborn and the dead?
description: Contact me for the PDF at chris.nuttall@antiken.uu.se