Paper long abstract:

It is widely acknowledged that kinship is a significant organizing principle of human grouping and often the basic matter of social categories in archaeological and anthropological societies. However, anthropology has long remained attached to classificatory approaches and abstract and formalist models, while archaeology has rarely resisted the temptation to construct rigid models of association of family types with house types or. This paper argues that another dimension of kinship may be more worth pursuing than kinship's morphological and structural segmentations: the role of diverse kin grouping in the organisation of social networks that may contribute to the reproduction of individual social units and may provide a framework for social relationships. Drawing on the recent re-conceptualization of kinship as a process in anthropology (e.g. Carsten 2000; Parkin and Stone 2004), the paper explores some of the many ways in which kinship provides a dynamic potential for connections and continuous transformations at a larger context as well through everyday acts, and which are variously manifest in households and settlements in Neolithic Greece, including architecture, material culture and burials.