Transport jars at the Mycenaean Citadel of Tiryns, Greece: new evidence from petrographic analysis of trade in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean
Author(s): Elina Kardamaki; Peter Day; Alkestis Papadimitriou; Joseph Maran; Marta Tenconi
Year: 2015
Summary
The analysis of Transport Stirrup Jars in the Aegean world has been seen as a test-case for the relative effectiveness and reliability of chemical and petrographic analysis in terms of provenance. These jars are important as they moved in large quantities between the ‘Minoan’ and ‘Mycenaean’ worlds and because they sometimes feature inscriptions in Linear B, reflecting elite control of production and consumption in Crete, as well as in a variety of mainland ‘palaces’. This makes the vessels key to our understanding of palatial Bronze Age economies, their modes of control, their collapse and successors.
Encouraged by recent successful work in Kommos, Crete, which revealed large scale commodity exchange, this project looks to the Mycenaean world and specifically at the fortified citadel of Tiryns. After an important macroscopic study previously reported at SAA, a large number of TSJs and also a range of Canaanite Jars of Levantine style, which are known to have transported commodities such as resins and oils, have been analysed by thin section petrography. The provenance of the jars provides important new evidence for trade and exchange in a period thought of as the twilight of the Mycenaean Palaces.
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Cite this Record
Transport jars at the Mycenaean Citadel of Tiryns, Greece: new evidence from petrographic analysis of trade in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean. Marta Tenconi, Peter Day, Elina Kardamaki, Joseph Maran, Alkestis Papadimitriou. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 397108)
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Keywords
Geographic Keywords
Europe
Spatial Coverage
min long: -11.074; min lat: 37.44 ; max long: 50.098; max lat: 70.845 ;