The Idea of the Houses: House layout and social change in Middle to Late Helladic Peloponnese

Within mainland Greek societies, the transition from the Middle to the Late Bronze Age is characterised as having seen considerable social, political, economic and cultural transformations leading to the emergence of palaces. Yet, being the locus of elites, palaces are unlikely to inform us on the way these changes affected the full spectrum of Mainland societies. To achieve this, we turn here to non-palatial dwellings that are increasingly considered a fruitful domain of investigation for exploring broad societal change. In this paper we analyse a sample of 149 domestic buildings, to assess whether social change happening in the Peloponnese at the transition between MH and LH influenced the layout of houses. The investigation reveals macro-trends related to the gradual disappearance of apsidal buildings and the growth of complexity in domestic buildings. This latter aspect seems to be geographically inflected and potentially connected to the unfolding of the trajectory of the Mycenaean palaces