Journal ArticleDOI
Crisis in Context: The End of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean
TLDR
The authors reviewed the current state of the archaeological and historical evidence and considered the coherence of climatic explanations and overprecise chronologies in attempting to place the "crisis" in context.Abstract:
Explanations for the Late Bronze Age crisis and collapse in the eastern Mediterranean are legion: migrations, predations by external forces, political struggles within dominant polities or system collapse among them, inequalities between centers and peripheries, climatic change and natural disasters, disease/plague. There has never been any overarching explanation to account for all the changes within and beyond the eastern Mediterranean, some of which occurred at different times from the mid to late 13th throughout the 12th centuries B.C.E. The ambiguity of the evidence—material, textual, climatic, chronological—and the differing contexts involved across the central-eastern Mediterranean make it difficult to disentangle background noise from boundary conditions and to distinguish cause from effect. Can we identify the protagonists of the crisis and related events? How useful are recent explanations that focus on climate and/or chronology in providing a better understanding of the crisis? This article reviews the current state of the archaeological and historical evidence and considers the coherence of climatic explanations and overprecise chronologies in attempting to place the “crisis” in context. There is no final solution: the human-induced Late Bronze Age “collapse” presents multiple material, social, and cultural realities that demand continuing, and collaborative, archaeological, historical, and scientific attention and interpretation. This article is available as open access on (AJA Online).read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Toward the Identification of the Goddess of Ekron
TL;DR: In this paper, a new hypothesis concerning the origin of the goddess of Ekron, mentioned in Ekron's royal dedicatory inscription from the early 7th century BCE, was proposed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Tracing a Late Holocene glacial climatic signal from source to sink under intensifying human erosion of Eastern Mediterranean landscapes
TL;DR: In this article, a review of the Holocene glacial phases on Mount Olympus, emphasizing the relative roles of external forcing and of the climatic drivers that triggered each episode of glaciation, traces the signal of a late Holoceneglacial phase from source to sink.
Timing is everything: radiocarbon dating multiple levels in the Mycenaean tholos tomb of Petroto, Achaia, Greece
TL;DR: The Petroto tholos is a prime case study for dating multiple burial levels because all eight levels were sequential as later burials did not disturb previous depositions as discussed by the authors, and the initial burial phase has been dated by ceramic chronology to the Late Helladic IIB-IIIA (ca. 1440-1400 BC).
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