Bachhuber, Christoph

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The Classical Reviewhttp://journals.cambridge.org/CARAdditional services for The Classical Review:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click hereTHE GREEK MEDITERRANEAN IN THE BRONZE AGE. L. SteelMateriality and Consumption in the Bronze Age Mediterranean.(Routledge Studies in Archaeology 7.) Pp. xviii + 263, ills, map. NewYork and London: Routledge, 2013. Cased, £80, US\$125. ISBN:978-0-415-53734-6.Christoph BachhuberThe Classical Review / Volume 65 / Issue 01 / April 2015, pp 247 - 249DOI: 10.1017/S0009840X14001590, Published online: 07 August 2014Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0009840X14001590How to cite this article:Christoph Bachhuber (2015). The Classical Review, 65, pp 247-249 doi:10.1017/S0009840X14001590Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/CAR, IP address: 130.133.152.82 on 15 Jun 2016Neapolitan team presents a workmanlike geoarchaeological report on two Campaniansequences, but avoids the bigger picture. In a different league altogether isD. Keenan-Jones’ riveting piece on the cultural politics of water diversion in the Tiber val-ley and for the Acqua Augusta, which is outstanding for its ambitious combination ofhydraulic, literary and archaeological information, as well as its exploration of the afterlifeand consequences of such ancient projects, right up to the present day.The papers in this volume neatly exemplify the prospects and problems ahead if a suc-cessful marriage of environmental–and especially climatic–sciences and the Classicalworld is to become a reality. As H. states, they primarily address the former’s impact onthe latter, and tacitly evade the symmetrical issue of what ancient Greece and Romemight tell us about wider planetary transformations in this regard. Now that, for a disciplineintending to affirm its place on a drastically changing Earth, is another very good questionindeed.CYPR IAN BROODBANKUniversity of Cambridgecb122@cam.ac.ukTHE GREEK MED I TERRANEAN IN THE BRONZEAGES T E E L ( L . ) Materiality and Consumption in the Bronze AgeMediterranean. (Routledge Studies in Archaeology 7.) Pp. xviii + 263,ills, map. New York and London: Routledge, 2013. Cased, £80, US$125. ISBN: 978-0-415-53734-6.doi:10.1017/S0009840X14001590S. synthesises anthropological approaches to cultural contact in the archaeology of theBronze Age Mediterranean; although in this book the Mediterranean is mostly definedby Cyprus, the Greek mainland, the Cyclades and Crete. In Chapter 1 S. introducescore concepts of the book like ‘connectivity’, ‘hybridization’ and ‘habitus’. Such conceptsfacilitate an understanding of the relationship between material culture and the negotiationof social roles and identities, as through time, the foreign and the exotic became increas-ingly ‘entangled’ (another oft-used word in the book) in local traditions in the Bronze Ageeastern Mediterranean.Developments of migration and colonisation are revisited in Chapter 2, showing howthese previously contentious terms have become acceptable in Anglophone scholarshipwith the agency-oriented approaches of post-processual archaeology. Considerations ofagency have diminished the essentialism of migration models, and the elitism and culturalbiases of colonisation models. The first case study addresses interactions between Minoansand non-Cretan populations throughout the Aegean. By foregrounding the local context ofMinoan colonisation and the habitus of urbanising Minoan lifestyles, in particularstatus-enhancing religious practices and the local, selective and creative embrace ofMinoan high culture on islands like Kythera and Kea, S. avoids the uni-directional modelsthat have dominated discussions of Minoan expansion throughout the twentieth century. Inanother case study, the Aegean character of object assemblages and architecture on Cyprusin the twelfth century highlights the presence of Mycenaean migrants within the unstablemilieu of the end of the Bronze Age. Here, social identities were fluidly negotiated betweenlocals and migrants in the context of geographically extensive population movements.THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 247The Classical Review 65.1 247–249 © The Classical Association (2015)Chapter 3 is the most explicitly ‘post-colonial’ in the book, drawing heavily on theworks of Gosden, van Dommelen and others. The chapter begins with an examinationof mixed Mycenaean and Minoan features in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae, the palaceof LM II-III Knossos, or the Warrior Burials near Knossos. With concepts like ‘hybridiza-tion’ or the ‘middle ground’, S. emphasises the local context of cultural contacts and offersa socially nuanced interpretation of interactions between Crete and the Greek mainlandduring the Late Bronze Age (LBA). Objects and assemblages from LBA Cyprus are treatedsimilarly, in particular the reception of orientalising cylinder seals and faience objects, andAegeanising ‘pastoral style’ painted pottery. But non-local influences are understood tohave been more pervasive in Cypriot society than anywhere else in the easternMediterranean.The relevance of anthropological approaches to gift exchange is the focus of Chapter4. Building from Mauss’ seminal writings on kula exchange, S. suggests that similar rela-tionships were initiated in Crete in the transition from the third to the second millennium.Objects and materials of Egyptian origin were acquired by Minoan seafarers and circulatedas symbolically charged and prestige-elevating objects within the gift-exchange networksof emergent elites on Crete. In the following centuries the spheres of Minoan gift exchangewould widen, culminating in long-distance diplomatic relationships, for example as theyare illustrated in Minoan gift-giving scenes in Egyptian tomb paintings. Less direct evi-dence for gift-giving is considered in the identification of Minoan Kamares ware andother forms of Minoan craftsmanship across the eastern Mediterranean. The fine ware pot-tery may have been introduced by Minoans in politically salient feasting contexts in theLevant or Egypt where gifts would have also been exchanged. Skilled Minoan craftsmanmay have also been exchanged as gifts, which S. proposes in an interpretation of theMinoan-style wall paintings in Hyksos and Levantine palaces.Other forms of long-distance exchange are examined in Chapter 5, beginning with adiscussion of the relationship between (inalienable) gifts and (alienable) commodities.S. is careful to note that an object like a Mycenaean stirrup jar can be manufactured andtranshipped as a commodity but exchanged or consumed as a gift. Nevertheless, themass-export of Mycenaean stirrup jars in the LBA represents the unprecedented commodi-fication of pottery and its contents (oil) in the eastern Mediterranean, opening up the pos-sibility for commercially-motivated trade networks that existed alongsidepolitically-motivated gift-giving. The following section addresses the archaeology of mer-chant activity and the agency of merchants in contexts of commercial and palatial (gift)exchange, with an emphasis on evidence from the LBA Uluburun shipwreck. Less convin-cingly, the discussion of merchants turns to evidence like a burial on Cyprus (the so-called‘Seafarers Tomb’ at Karmi Palealona) or conspicuous concentrations of Mycenaean figur-ines at Ugarit and other port cities in the Levant. The chapter concludes, somewhat incon-gruously, by considering how orientalia in LBA graves and other ritual contexts in Cypruswere used in the negotiation of elite identities. This section would have fitted better in the‘Entangled Worlds’ of Chapter 3.In Chapter 6 S. focuses on craft specialisation with a similar concern for the agency andspecial status of craftsmen, drawing heavily on authors like Gell and Helms in analyses ofivory carvings and bronze stands. The chaîne opératoire of such objects is a key consid-eration, emphasising the distant (and potentially supernatural) origins of materials likeivory or metal, and the esoteric knowledge of the craft specialist whose ‘enchanting’ skillsare defined by the ability to transform distantly-procured raw materials into symbolicallypotent and desirable objects. The chapter concludes with a discussion of pottery in BronzeAge Cyprus. Here S. is less concerned with the enchanting aspects of craftsmanship, focus-ing rather on the more prosaic contexts of pottery’s production and consumption.THE CLASSICAL REVIEW248Chapter 7 develops a biographical approach to a range of objects identified in Crete, theGreek mainland and Cyprus. S. suggests that widely circulated scarabs and Egyptian stonevases inscribed with royal cartouches gained their value in long-distance gift-exchange net-works through their association both with an illustrious pharaoh, and with the string ofelites who owned the object previously. Ceramic objects from Cyprus are thought tohave been biographical in a different sense. Use-wear on Mycenaean kraters depositedin graves reveals the long life-histories of these objects. Here the krater was used as com-mensal furniture in commemorative events that marked culturally significant transforma-tions in the deceased person’s life, for example in a birth, marriage, or death. RedPolished plank figurines are understood to be biographical for similar reasons, and wereused in similar contexts. Alternatively, the biography of the Vonous bowl relates less toits use, and more to the complex ‘biographical’ scene of the plastic decoration, whichS. suggests depicts transformative stages of an important man’s life: progressing frombirth, puberty, to his ascendance to the status of elder and eventually ancestor.The concluding Chapter 8 is a cursory if rushed overview of the book’s dominantthemes, and offers little in the way of insightful synthesis. This book can be read in twoways. It is a useful overview of Anglophone interactionist approaches to Bronze Agearchaeology of the eastern Mediterranean. It will be valued by students, or by specialistswho are not well-acquainted with anthropological approaches to the Bronze Age archae-ology of this region. As such, it can be read like a ‘handbook’. But as a research mono-graph it is predictable, and slavishly adheres to the Anglophone mainstream ofMediterranean prehistory where the Bronze Age Mediterranean equates with the Greekmainland, Crete, the Cyclades and Cyprus. Bar LBA shipwrecks, I was dismayed thatthe archaeology of coastal Anatolia was entirely excluded from this study. A critical readermight also be wary of the overuse of words like ‘hybridization’, ‘enchantment’, ‘entangle-ment’ and ‘habitus’. These powerful concepts risk becoming anodyne, or worse jargon, intheir overuse. Likewise, the book’s claim to challenge ‘reductive’ approaches to the BronzeAge Mediterranean is a straw man. Quotations from J. Boardman, for example, are afavourite target of critique. The book would have been more interesting if it had engagedwith continental European approaches to the past, in particular German-language scholar-ship, which historically has maintained a long interest in problems related to diffusion andculture contact between east and west, and which has also evolved in the sophistication ofits approaches. This raises a related point: I counted 11 non-English language publicationsin an extensive bibliography: half of these were the monographs of acceptable Frenchauthors like Bourdieu, Mauss and Braudel, translated into English.CHR I STOPH BACHHUBERFreie Universität Berlincbachhuber@zedat.fu-berlin.dePYL IAN NAMES IN L INEAR BNA K A S S I S ( D . ) Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos.(Mnemosyne Supplements 358.) Pp. xviii + 448, figs, ills, maps. Leidenand Boston: Brill, 2013. Cased, E123, US$171. ISBN:978-90-04-24451-1.doi:10.1017/S0009840X14002625N.’s monograph is a redacted and updated version of his doctoral dissertation for theUniversity of Texas (‘The Individual and the Mycenaean State’ [2006]). His simple andTHE CLASSICAL REVIEW 249The Classical Review 65.1 249–252 © The Classical Association (2015)

Steel (L.) Materiality and Consumption in the Bronze Age Mediterranean.
(Routledge Studies in Archaeology 7.) Pp. xviii + 263, ills, map. New York and
London: Routledge, 2013

https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/bitstream/fub188/15942/1/bachhuber.pdf

Steel (L.) Materiality and Consumption in the Bronze Age Mediterranean. (Routledge Studies in Archaeology 7.) Pp. xviii + 263, ills, map. New York and London: Routledge, 2013

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