The acronym ODYSSEIA stands for: Organic Data Yields in Aegean Bronze Age material culture. Scientific, Sensory, Ethnographic, Experimental, and Iconographic Approaches to human-environment interactions through crafting. In this project, we aim to revise our understanding of how Aegean people in the 2nd millennium BCE related to their physical environment. For this, we will investigate the socio-economic roles of their organic materials in a world known for its elite conspicuous consumption of durable materials and richly decorated palaces. We will achieve this via a multidisciplinary survey of a wide range of organic materials and objects of faunal and floral origins. In order to reconstruct the workflows of how these organic objects have been produced but also used, our holistic and novel methodology combines Aegean and Egyptian iconography, Bronze Age and later texts, ethnographic and experimental studies, 3D modelling, and scientific analyses of archaeological remains. Based on the workflows and how these intersect, their labour cost rates will be calculated. These calculations, based on optimal socio-economic work patterns, and on pre-industrial agricultural subsistence activities, will redress the socio-economic and political imbalances in the power between elites and others in the 2nd millennium BCE. It will complement existing labour data on Late Bronze Age Aegean inorganic workflows. These new data will render visible both organics and a fuller range of Bronze Age people interacting with them, and it will result in a comprehensive, gendered taskscape narrative.
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