A 06

Sub-project A 06 aims to investigate developments in the handling of resources during the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age in the Eastern Mediterranean, with a particular focus on the Levant. The focus is on connectivity and exchange as a resource structure as well as the role of the specific resource cultures of the coastal cities in the socio-cultural dynamics of that epoch. Since the transition from the SBA to the DC is characterised by multiple changes, it is particularly well suited to examining multidimensional dynamics of change in the handling of resources. Alternating movements between processes of globalisation and those of regionalisation characterise the socio-cultural developments in the period from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age II in the eastern Mediterranean region (ca. 1500-500 BC). 

Sub-project A 06 has been researching these developments in the East Mediterranean region since the first funding phase of the CRC. In the first funding phase, supra-regional exchange ("long-distance trade") was investigated as a resource in the southern Levant. The second funding phase used iconographic media (scroll seals and reliefs or sculptures), as part of two resource complexes, to compare socio-political developments during this period in the southern and northern Levant. The aim of the third funding phase of the CRC is to bundle the research of the sub-project as a whole by analysing specific resource cultures of the region that are oriented towards connectivity. Their development is to be recorded by analysing several resource complexes, determined by infrastructures such as interregional networks and cultural contacts. These investigations will ultimately lead to a synthesis that comprehensively describes the socio-cultural dynamics by analysing the associated resource cultures.

In the third funding phase, sub-project A 06 will analyse four different groups of material that complement the topics dealt with in the sub-project to date:

1. Cypriot imported pottery in the Levant from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age II (Meryem Büyükyaka).
2. Greek imported pottery in the central Levant in the Iron Age II and III (Dr Maximilian Rönnberg).
3. Terracotta statuettes of the Levant (Late Bronze Age to Iron Age II) in comparison with Cypriot terracottas (in cooperation with Dr Adriano Orsingher, Barcelona).
4. Construction technique of walls using ashlars and rubble stones (so-called 'pier-and-rubble' technique, Late Bronze Age to Hellenistic) in the Levant and their distribution in the wider Mediterranean region (Dr Maximilian Rönnberg).

While the first three material groups focus on different aspects of the economic, social and religious level of exchange in the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean, the fourth study focusses on the exchange of construction knowledge.

The divergent material groups (in addition to the materials dealt with so far in the sub-project) will reveal different patterns of exchange processes within these resource cultures characterised by connectivity and thus enable a synthesis for the sub-project. The comparison of their use in Canaan, Cyprus and Phoenicia must be carried out in a differentiated manner and, among other things, take into account interdependencies between internationalisation and fragmentation. This approach makes it possible to analyse and interpret developments in the Eastern Mediterranean from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age in an innovative way. The focus will be on a comparison of Late Bronze Age societies in the Levant (focus: southern Levant/Canaan/Cyprus) with those of the Iron Age II (focus: central Levant/Phoenicia/Cyprus). Both Canaan and Cyprus (during the Late Bronze Age) and Phoenicia and Cyprus (during the Iron Age II) are characterised by infrastructures that are strongly oriented towards supra-regional contacts. The different forms of connectivity and exchange tangible here thus reflect differentiable processes of valorisation, which can be described as resource complexes for individual time phases and, with regard to their temporal development, as resource structures, and reflect specific resource cultures for the individual social communities.