East Cretan ceramics during the advanced Late Bronze Age: Assessing regional traditions and interaction networks

Langohr, Charlotte [UCL]

Recent studies acknowledge Mycenaean cultural and political interference as well as continuous acculturation processes and hybridization phenomena in an effort to reconstruct Late Minoan II-IIIB Cretan society through an analysis of its material culture and interactions with the Mycenaean Mainland. This paper proposes to investigate the sociocultural characterisation of Cretan communities during the advanced Late Bronze Age from an East Cretan perspective. Based on a diachronic typological and stylistic analysis of ceramic assemblages from different sites of this region (Palaikastro, Mochlos, Petras, etc.), the degree of regional connectivity and variation in pottery consumption is assessed. Such an approach allows to examine local and regional ceramic traditions in terms of pottery exchange and cultural interconnection. It also informs on the maintenance and/or transformation of sociocultural identities within and between regional communities in the wider context of Mycenaeanization processes of the island. The more specific recognition of interaction networks at both intra- and inter-regional scales will be preliminarily considered.