Shortly before her death, my grandmother expressed a strongly felt sentiment not to lie in the family tomb next to her sister-in-law. It was not quite clear what was to be done with the bones of the woman who by then had occupied the space next to her brother, my grandfather, for some five years. My mother resolved the issue by depositing the urn with my grandmother's ashes on the other side of my grandfather's coffin, stating matter-of-factly, ‘We are not about to toss the aunt out, and we will certainly not build a new tomb.’ Acting in a relational web of moral obligations and duties as a good daughter, my mother also proceeded as a rational modern individual in the universe of limited choices in Eastern Europe. Cremation replaced interment, therefore ‘lying next to’ was no longer an issue in a literal sense. At the same time, the filial duty of a proper burial in the family tomb was conducted with all the necessary ritual, wide kin in attendance. This incident came to my mind when reading about the archaeological dilemma of mortuary analysis described in Voutsaki's essay: to what extent do burials express the will, agency and station in life of the deceased as opposed to those of the wider kin relations responsible for burying them? Do the actions that archaeologists interpret on the basis of burials derive from choices by individual, cognizant agents, or do they represent a moral world in which adherence to certain practices defines a ‘good person’? I wish to address two issues from this presentation, one more philosophical and the other directly addressing the archaeological record of the Mycenaeans. First, I will consider whether the shift from agency to personhood (and back) proposed in this essay solves interpretive problems created by the recent embrace of agency. Second, I am intrigued by the question that Voutsaki poses about why images appear in this period, as it seems to me that a potential answer may lie in her detailed exposition of moral theory if one looks carefully, or extends it slightly beyond the intended meaning.

Voutsaki presents a detailed and careful review of agency in archaeology, concluding rightfully (in my opinion) that there seems to be only a very thin and rather unconvincing thread between the theoretical models and the archaeological evidence brought out to support them. Furthermore, individual choice, real or potential, still seems to be what agency represents to most archaeologists, despite claims to the contrary, and despite their denial of projecting contemporary versions of individualism into the past. Yet Voutsaki does not abandon the concept of agency completely, opting to substitute ‘personhood’ instead. She attempts to explore the social and historical construction of a person, and in the end returns with a hope for agency. The investigation leads her to consider the Mycenaean dead as ‘relational, embedded, permeable, partible “dividuals”’ (p. 69), potentially visible from multiple angles. Thus an individual becomes a person in a moral world defined by relations to others, rather than by reference to norms and rules imagined through the self. Persons, as the plural better captures the shift away from individualism, become ‘moral agents’ whose actions define the universe of the ‘heroic society’, including the Mycenaean world at its onset. Yet in the end, Voutsaki cannot bring herself to give up agency, asking, ‘How can we understand whether people reflected upon, redefined, moved forward from, or simply conformed to these generalized ideas? How can we see agency in the archaeological record . . .?’ (p. 88). Voutsaki concludes that ‘people could set their own goals and transform their lives precisely because of this interconnectivity’ (p. 91). The disquiet this reader was left with resides not necessarily in the tension between the archaeological evidence and the research questions, but in asking questions that may be quite unintelligible to the average Mycenaean. A shift into a relational world, away from individual decisions, would possibly alter the question of agency, crossing a cultural divide to the extent that the meaning of the concept may be absent in the society under investigation (e.g. could one ‘act’ without reference to non-human forces?). Furthermore, the larger question that this dilemma poses is fundamental for archaeology as a discipline. If we were to accept a greater degree of difficulty in imagining any relationship to the people in the past – if we could not answer whether the Mycenaeans recognized issues we hold dear or not – would that limit archaeology as a field? The answer to this, in my view, lies in the role of archaeology in any one society, and in the acknowledgement of the multiple goals and the political nature of the discipline in pursuit of knowledge. Yet I wish to be emphatic that mine is not a position rooted in a claim of the impossibility of knowledge about the past; rather it stems from a desire to recognize the possibility that some past societies may have differed significantly from our notions of the social (for illuminating discussions of the ‘social’ and the ‘material’ in recent archaeological debates see e.g. Olsen 2003; Webmoore and Witmore 2008).

For many archaeologists, Alasdair MacIntyre's discussion of ‘heroic morality’ (1991) will offer refreshing new insight into the past, even if based on readings of ancient Greek philosophers rather than on material remains. Yet I would like to suggest that by reading MacIntyre, and several other scholars of moral philosophy carefully, we may have to rethink not only agency but also personhood, and a few other concepts central to social archaeology in any prehistoric context. Taking MacIntyre's thesis seriously, we have to accept the temporal distance between past and present societies as meaningful and consequential. A rupture with the past would present us with a modern, post-Enlightenment individual as a significantly different creature, as MacIntyre suggests in his description of a ‘post-Christian’ human being. As a result, archaeology may find itself on a far shakier theoretical ground than many might realize. The claim would make the past – particularly the remote past – a world lost or at least quite removed, thus much harder to study, understand or describe. Processual and postprocessual archaeologists might unite in defense of shared human traits or natures, or emotional or biological urges, needs and responses. Yet I would like to encourage this line of thinking, as it forces us to be more imaginative and creative in asking questions about the past, rather than merely seeking roots of modern behaviours, social or natural problems, as we mostly currently do. The concept of ‘anatomically modern humans’ as the basis for our cultural and social behaviour seems to have a firm grip on the archaeological imagination (for insightful discussions see Ingold 1995; Corbey and Roebroeks 2001). Yet if the Mycenaeans were truly partible, permeable, relational, then our notions of the ways to be human – not to mention a virtuous human participating in an honourable burial – might expand in interesting ways.

Voutsaki defines personhood as fluid and embedded in social relations, yet also locates it in ‘differently defined . . . cultural values and moral commitments’ (p. 74) for each actor. This appears to suggest a return to an individual as the lynchpin of cultural experience, a perspective that risks replicating the Western notion of selfhood that assumes a development within a culture, particularly a development towards a subjective conception (for an extended discussion of this point see Gill 2006). Ultimately MacIntyre's moral agent is incompatible with the person that Voutsaki tries to reconstitute. Here I will draw on Amélie Oksenberg Rorty's discussion (1976; 1990) of ‘persons and personae’. Rorty makes a convincing argument that there is no equivalent in either Greek or Latin to a word that would translate as the modern ‘person’, as we currently understand it. She offers a list of necessary criteria – legal, social, biological – for one to be considered a person, all dependent on the social and historical function that the concept is trying to satisfy:

I note this in some detail not to deny the possibility of describing a person or personhood in Middle or Late Helladic society, but rather to ask for a definition used in this context, so as to know what work this concept is doing for the archaeologist. Hence to suggest ‘personhood’ as an analytical tool is not sufficient, if we do not know whether this is a class into which only some qualify, and therefore specific social criteria apply, or if it is assumed to be a universal category. As any scholar of ancient Greece knows, this is a setting where slaves, barbarians or helots could in later periods quite precisely define a human condition devoid of personhood in the legal and moral senses of the term. In contrast to later Christian (and post-Christian, as MacIntyre would have it) epochs in Europe, Greeks and Romans condoned infanticide and abortion, clearly suggesting a different understanding of life, death and the place of a person between the two.

The conditions of personhood would presumably be quite different if critical rationality, rather than sociability, were the defining and dominant characteristic of what made a person. As Rorty (1990, 25) depicts our notion of the modern subject: ‘a person is essentially capable of stepping back from her beliefs and desires, and evaluate their rationality and appropriateness; she is also capable (at the very least) of attempting to form and modify her beliefs and desires, her actions’. This is presumably how we would describe an autonomous agent, a person who possesses agency. Yet by most accounts, this was a definition that was absent in heroic societies, where sociability, as described by Voutsaki, was the central element. The notion of a person as it is used in modern parlance first appeared in medieval times in the context of a theatre, as the dramatis personae – the masks worn by actors, the roles in a dramatic unfolding of action (MacIntyre 1991; Rorty 1976). Yet while this points to quite a significant shift in a post-Enlightenment notion of the self, it is useful in a discussion of a social person. I suggest that attention to interactions within social networks may be potentially illuminating as far as ‘moral agents’ are concerned. If Mycenaean personhood is to be approached as meshed and embedded with others, defined by roles in the course of events, then dramatis personae may be a useful metaphor. A concept in MacIntyre's writing that an archaeologist of the early Greek society may find useful, besides that of the moral agent, is that of a narrative – a story that one participates in, or enacts. Personhood may then be explored as a role, a performance in a larger life story, a narrative where the self was not an author, but a participant in the construction of the story, in the emergent content of the narrative (Rorty 1976, 30). This is where other theoretical approaches may help in answering several of the intriguing questions that the Mycenaean record presents – the explosion of imagery, and the representation and inclusion of animals in human contexts.

If we take the materiality of social life seriously and extend the possibility of roles for objects, as well as animals and humans, then the Mycenaean images, and their emergence and proliferation, acquire a new meaning. Not a meaning in the interpretive sense of representation, but a new role that they might have played as material objects, as solid statements of social realities that, unlike words, were tangible and visible. Latour's suggestion of networks as connections between human and non-human actors may be a good starting point in this discussion (Latour 1993; 1999). If the moral agents of heroic societies were embedded in larger narratives of the moral universe, then the images deposited in graves and on certain objects would not only represent certain social facts, but would actually stabilize them, make them real and permanent through their emergence as material objects. The represented bodies, depicted in great detail but without faces, were iconic and social facts simultaneously. They expressed meaning or represented something that already existed in the society, but they also shaped the moral universe. If these images were actors, they were possibly more durable than the bodies in the graves, not as durable material objects, but as participants in relationships engaged in other subsequent contexts. Thus we could think about the animals and objects as parts of the social world, a network of different actors who all played a role in the narrative of the good moral life (for an interesting discussion in a very different context see Whitridge 2004). The question that remains to be answered, then, is – why the sudden explosion of images at this particular time at the onset of the Mycenaean society? Could it be a particular moral narrative that called on all the actors to stabilize the emerging heroic moral story?