Cinnabar and the Cyclades: Body modification and political structure in the late EBI Southern Aegean.

The late EBI period provides significant evidence for the Cyclades coming into wider contact with the Aegean world as cultural entity; the genesis of Colin Renfrew's "International Spirit". Most likely borne by members of the island communities themselves, material culture of Cycladic origin and / or influence has been recovered from Attica, Euboea, Crete, Lemnos and Western Turkey [Caria]. Concurrent with these developments, and undoubtedly an integral part of the new political processes which motivated this long-distance voyaging and contact, was the appearance of maritime iconography and a heightened significance afforded body modification.

In regards to the latter phenomenon, it can be seen that pre-existing mechanisms for displaying the 'body politic' (kin and corporate identity, status, gender etc.), were modified and supplemented by a much wider range of implements, raw materials and associations. This paper concentrates upon one of the manners by which the human body was employed to both encapsulate and articulate the changes in Early Cycladic society at this time, namely the use of pigments for body painting and / or tattooing.

Red colorants are commonly recognised upon the marble figurines, bowls, palettes and pestles of the Early Cycladic burial record, and are considered to indicate that these pigments were employed in 'real-life' for bodily decoration, using permanent or impermanent methods of application. It was generally assumed that these colorants were 'ochre', an iron oxide easily available within the Aegean, from sources such as Thassos, or more famously, Kea. However, recent analysis of pigments upon Cycladica from the British Museum has indicated that much of this material may in fact have been cinnabar. These result's significance lies in the extreme rarity of this mercury compound (and its physical properties), with classical authors such as Theophrastus indicating that the material's nearest sources to Greece were at Ephesus and Almaden, Spain. New research has questioned these claims and this paper will describe recent geological prospection in the Cyclades and a discussion of alternative cinnabar sources available to, and possibly exploited by members of these Early Cycladic communities.