1In this chapter, I hope to achieve three aims: (1) to convince readers that there was such a social practice as ‘deliberate fragmentation’ and that it played an important role in societies in many different time-places, including the Aegean Bronze Age; (2) to discuss the relationship between fragmentation and destruction, as well as other key relational terms such as mimesis, defacement and sacrifice; and (3) to problematise the relationship between fragmentation and various kinds of enchainment, using Aegean examples.

Our fragmented past

2If anything characterises archaeological remains, it is their fragmentary nature. Whether it is a fragment of a pot, a fragment of a house or a part (fragment) of a graveyard, it ultimately leads to the reconstruction of a fragment of our past. It is a surprise, then, that for a very long time fragments constituted ‘rubbish’ in archaeology, probably because of “the commonplace that archaeology is concerned with the rubbish of past generations”