Message #115768

[Bianca]

Dendro-chronology with Lebanese cedar wood will still need many years of study to fill the gaps for an absolute standard chronology, and scientists are working on other independent dating methods. The historical chronology with its datum lines of first appearances of artefacts and pumices and with "stratigraphie compare" have, on the other hand, provided a consistent umbrella-chronology which suggests linking the Egyptian with a quite low Mesopotamian chronology. "While the main outlines of this chronology seem to be satisfactory, detailed research has still to be undertaken to establish a well founded chronological structure," Bietak said.

Marie-Henriette Gates from Bilkent University in Ankara presented a keynote speech on the maritime business in the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean, saying that archaeological analysis of imported and exported finds had shifted over the past century from description to explanation, in line with other developments in the discipline's research enquiry. The appeal of exotica remains constant, however. Their very presence opens an immediate window onto maritime cross-cultural contacts.

"Although Bronze Age sites in this region provide a rich illustration of such transactions, neutrally attributed to trade and exchange, it has also proved a more difficult challenge to reconstruct the economic, cultural and social mechanisms behind these exchanges," she said.

Gates explained that contemporary written documents gave precise evidence that was both invaluable and one-sided. The predominance in explanatory models for Mediterranean and Aegean maritime affairs, particularly for the second millennium BC, had magnified administrative constraints and emphasised classification of goods.

Few discussions address the eastern Mediterranean's dense distribution of Bronze Age ports, ranking, like settlements on land, from large and well-connected to modest and remote. These ports reflect economic circumstances of differing scales and intensities, but they were all equally dependent on shipping networks and maritime business.

Linda Hulin from Oxford University took the audience to another segment of the Mediterranean, that of the Libyan community during the Bronze Age. Hulin said models of Libyan society in the pre-classical period came from a variety of sources that were rarely contemporary or indigenous.

"We rely primarily upon epigraphic and art historical material from Egypt, particularly the Third Intermediate Period and from the classical world, to model Libyan society in the Bronze Age," she said. "The small amount of archaeological material, including rock art, is difficult to date."