Atlantic World Research Network | Lunchtime colloquia 2024-2025

Lunchtime colloquia 2024-2025

Power PLAYS at Pylos: THE PAST AND MEMORY IN THE TOMBS AND THE PALACE

Dr. Joanne Murphy, Department Head and professor of Ancient Mediterranean studies and Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro

March 19th, 2025

Power Plays at Pylos: The Past and Memory in the Tombs and the Palace 

Joanne M.A. Murphy – University of North Carolina Greensboro 

In attendance: 

Dr. Murphy’s research centers on excavated tombs and status building ideologies, specifically in Southwestern Greece, focusing on the Palace of Pylos. 

Osmananga Lagoon and the island of Sphacteria are also areas of interest, as there are great geographic advantages to these areas. 

Carl William Blegen and Marion Rawson pursued excavations of this area for over 30 years from the 1930s to the 1960s and are credited with finding the bathtub that centers some of this research. Dr. Murphy has returned to these sites, studied them further, and to a significant degree challenged and revised our understandings of their functions—increasingly stressing the local variety of Bronze Age burial practices and memorials, against the past century’s theories of a supposedly uniform practice based on the traditions of Bronze Age Mycenae. 

Dr. Murphy displayed an illustrated ground plan for the Palace of Pylos, which includes several amenities including storage areas, feasting rooms, and archival rooms. The occupants of the palace were living an elevated and wealthy lifestyle.  

We are able to make conclusions about the nature of this hierarchical society because of the translations of the early Greek alphabet called Linear B.  

Palatial Concerns—the ideas that shaped the Palace’s design, construction, and development—are those of Production, Consumption, or Religious Activities. 

Dr. Murphy’s work examines major changes in Pylian society, specifically in changes regarding the dead, memory, and how the dead are remembered.  

Death threatens the existence of power and creates a vacuum. Dr. Murphy examines the complications of rituals in lineage and hierarchies; for example, one ritual manages the transition of power by enacting the naming of heirs before royalty passes away.  

Ceremonies of death are focused on relationships and leverage the malleability of memory. Through the act of storytelling, this memory becomes more fluid. 

Dr. Murphy argues that Memory (in general and in Pylos) is utilized as a long-term power strategy, focusing on the power strategy at tombs in LH I – II (c. 1700-1420 BC). This is done by considering the transition from the tomb to the palace.  

Construction of Mortuary Landscape manipulates memory as well as a concept of time: past, present, and future. It manipulates the concept of space (a tomb represents in the landscape a pause in time) and shifts memory from the individual and fluid to the communal. Fixed on a societal level, and memorialized in monuments and other works of art, the stories become solidified. 

Items found in these graves include useful and ornamental pottery, objects of wealth such as metalwork and amethysts, and hunting weaponry. Boar hunting, an extremely dangerous sport, is depicted on seal stones.  

These items deposited in the graves are examples of memory manipulation. Those building and filling these monuments wanted to communicate to the future that those who had died were strong, wealthy, and dominated nature. 

Containers of perfume are commonly found in the graves, and there was a perfume production location inside the Palace of Pylos.  

The use of perfume was an indicator of status. By producing the perfume inside the palace and distributing it to all who visited, those who attended their feasts were marked with a signifier of status, which they carried with them outside the palace, spreading the aroma of their importance about them.  

Hall 64 of the Palace of Pylos also functions as an example of materializing social memory.  

The war scene painted on the wall in this hallway manipulates time and memory as the past and present are intermixed in the scene. This manipulation appears through the depiction of the boar’s tusk helmet, a more ancient form of armor, that was no longer worn during the Bronze Age era which produced this wall painting, and which reminded the contemporary viewers of their valiant warrior ancestors who were able to kill enough dangerous wild boars to make such a tusk helmet possible.  

Hall 64 represents a tension of time in theme and style, showing the ancient historicity of the boar’s tusk helmet, and the short daggers of LH IIIB. 

This is a contrast with the other scenes depicted in the palace. Dr. Murphy describes the importance of considering how the scene may influence the social cultural atmosphere of the rooms and palaces.  

While the location of the Pylos Palace death rituals changed, and while these changes represented a shift in power from tombs to palaces, components of these rituals stayed the same. At both, memory is stressed through the manipulation of histories regarding heroic ancestral warriors and hunters.  

General Questions and Discussions: 

“The zombie memes of dixie”

Dr. Scott Romine, professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro

April 9th, 2025

Presentation LinkDownload

Atlantic World Research Network  

April 9th, 2024 

Dr. Scott Romine: The Zombie Memes of Dixie (2025) 

Please also see  Dr. Romine’s PowerPoint, linked here. 

In attendance: 

Introduction of Samuel Phillips Day and the Cavalier Thesis, how cavaliers of the South played their role in translating British civilization to the New World. Considered “founders of the aristocracy.” 

This begins with the Cavaliers of Virginia, and then is mutated into folk knowledge, “What we know because we know it” (Adolph Reed, The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives), and in knowing it, what makes us us, defining the Southern Identity.  

Cavalier acts as an example of a ‘Dixie meme.’ 

These ‘memes’ are created through the progression of the Idea to Identitarianism, through the process of positivism and idealism. The Idea is neither a copy nor a script, but becomes a flag around which the group rallies, often in response to criticisms made of the group. “A flag represents the group but doesn’t look like the group.” 

This creates a conflict between the Idea or Image, and “the south we hold in our minds.” 

‘Dixie memes’ are tropes, conceptions, and personifications of the South that have been thought and said the most, transmitted virally. 

A “meme” is understood as a kind of “mind virus,” a cultural equivalent of genes. Memes make teams, and should be understood in their group forming capacity, similar to “the flag,” or other rallying paraphernalia.  

“The south isn’t just the Southeast. It’s something more. According to the Southern meme, The South emerges inevitably and organically from the Southeast.” 

The name “Southerner” has never been used to include all people from the Southeast. 

Bruno Latour, a French philosopher, considers how the group spokespersons “render the group definition a finite and sure thing, so finite and sure that, in the end, it looks like the object of unproblematic definition.” 

Further, there is the invention of “strategic essentialism” in order to build boundaries or associate genetic makeups with tradition.  

Memes help us understand the South from the Southeast. Dr. Romine argues there has never been an “unmediated south.” 

How “so-called” has been functioned as a qualifier, and how language defines our understanding of the South. For example, the naming of enslaved people in the south being qualified with “so-called.” 

‘Dixie memes’ are structured in a way that emphasize a We vs. They philosophy of South vs. North: 

Cavaliers vs. Puritans 
Heat vs. Cold 
Tradition vs. Modernity 
Leisure vs. Hurry-Scurry 

Beliefs don’t do their work unless you believe them, have loyalty to them. 

In the 1830s, the South became self-conscious, and the defense of slavery turned into the defense of the plantation owners. 

This self-conscious identity was paired with the idea that hospitality in the North was unknown.  

Walter Benn Michaels calls this kind of ideological development “the disarticulation of difference from disagreement.”  

John C. Calhoun’s “Slavery as a Positive Good” claims that destroying slavery would destroy the Southern people.  

“For many commentators, it was evident that southern hospitality depended on slavery. The South had both; the North had neither.”  

Anthony Szczesiul writes that “the southern hospitality myth has served as a master discourse about race in America, consistently encoding American racial ideologies in a regressive manner.” 

Romine presents Walter Hines Page’s The Southerner (set in a fictionized “Edinboro,” a version of Greensboro, NC) as a southern version of W. E. B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness,” where living Southerners are forced to carry the shadow of the self-conscious Southerner, “the old defensive man.” 

The long-standing cultural connection between the ‘Southern’ identity and the Anglo-Saxon cultural identity continued to be prevalent. In a 1955 speech by Senator James O. Eastland defending segregation, “Defeat means death, the death of Southern culture and our aspirations as an Anglo-Saxon people.” 

Southern locality is threatened (and emboldened) by abolitionists, union soldiers, carpetbaggers, Darwinists, and imported tomatoes. The tomatoes become another vital example of the “Dixie meme,” a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich.  

Dr. Romine poses the question: Is the South a bad idea? It might be good to think less of the South, he says; instead we need to reconsider the South we hold collectively in our minds, which often depends on a few stock signifiers and images. 

Further, what are the consequences of this belief in the South?  

Group Questions and Discussion 

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