This short chapter draws together some interpretative loose ends raised by the preceding analyses but more importantly revisits the wider issue of how we might use stone vessels to consider the ways in which objects are valued in Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean societies. It concludes the book by considering first what happens to the Bronze Age stone vessel traditions in the altered circumstances of the first millennium BC and then returns to some of the theoretical challenges raised in Chapter 2. Finally, it suggests some directions in which future research might lead.

After the Bronze Age

The severe dislocation of existing elite power structures that occurred in most areas of the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age brought with it a decline, or in many cases the complete disappearance, of elite-sponsored crafts such as wall-painting, monument building, gold, faience, and ivory work (e.g. Peltenburg 2002; Sherratt 2003). Upper elite manufacture of stone vessels in exotic rocks also collapses, reappearing only much later in a Persian predilection for stone vessels to go alongside their precious metal tableware (Cahill 1985: 382–3; Amiet 1983). More broadly, however, different stone vessel industries responded in different ways to these disruptions, reflecting the varying points at which they had been inserted into the existing social and economic hierarchy.

Value is a term that cries out for careful definition. It has a curiously ambivalent semantic wer, referring to both tangible and intangible culture, to objects that we think of as commodities and those that we do not, and to meanings that we think of as personal and those that we treat as collective social givens. Indeed, object value arguably inhabits exactly this social space, an interface between what we assume to be objective and what we recognise as subjective (Simmel 1900). This is reflected nicely by the fact that the terms people often use to describe this domain—for example, in English, value(s), taste, worth—evoke wider social mores, natural sensory skills, or even innate moral rules but thereby often conceal definitions that are potentially vulnerable and up for negotiation (Bourdieu 1994: 99). This chapter considers these rather ambiguous meanings, the way object value may reflect the wider ordering of human relations, and how, if at all, it might manifest itself archaeologically. Some of the issues raised are declared merely to make the analytical preoccupations of Chapters 4–8 more transparent, while others are revisited directly in later analyses, particularly in Chapters 8 and 9.

Value is not something inherent in things but is a culturally constructed property.

Chapters 5 and 6 explored the social roles that stone vessels played over the third and earlier second millennia, a time in which different regions of the eastern Mediterranean were brought into increasingly frequent contact. Such entanglement became even more intense in the later LBA as privileged groups consumed a range of international exotica that were contextualised differently in different communities but nevertheless possessed a widespread currency as status markers. Two major developments at either end of the geographic zone under consideration here provide particularly relevant background to the following discussion. First, the campaigns of Thutmosis III brought large areas of the Levant under Egyptian control or influence. Ideologically, these conquests were part of a long tradition of smiting the amu, but this time their political and cultural impact was far more profound. The material result was a more permanent Egyptian political interest in the Levantine kingdoms, a flood of war booty into Egypt and, more gradually, an increased demand for and sensitivity to a range of foreign material culture. The second, roughly contemporary development was the destruction of most of the Cretan palaces and with them the disappearance of many of the chief components of Neopalatial material culture. At Knossos, an important palatial centre persisted after these destructions and continued to produce stone vessels, challenging us to makes sense of evidence for both continuity and disjuncture.

This appendix offers rough stone vessel typologies for each region. Several of the typologies have been directly transposed from existing published classifications and, where this occurs, the numbering system has been kept consistent with the original one but modified with a regional prefix (e.g. C20B refers to Cretan shape 20B from Warren's 1969 classification). For each shape, a brief description is given, along with an account of variation within the group, decoration (if any), and an estimated date range for the type. Type drawings are meant as a rough guide only: profiles are solid when taken from a specific example and otherwise dotted. A list of examples or reference to where such a list can be found within existing published catalogues is also provided but is not meant to be comprehensive. In the case of the very large Egyptian and Cretan traditions, the range of shapes is illustrated here, but the reader is referred to the original classifications for further details about individual types.

Egypt (E-)

The numbered sequence of shapes has been borrowed from Aston (1994) with minor alterations. As with Warren's Cretan classification, Aston's individual types make distinctions at a slightly finer scale (e.g. for bowls) than the other typologies offered here and hence comparisons of type diversity should proceed cautiously. The earlier fourth millennium shapes in Aston's series (e.g. 1–24) have been omitted.

This book examines the role of stone vessels throughout the eastern Mediterranean and over a period of two millennia during the Bronze Age (ca. 3000–1200 BC). This period and region saw perhaps the most prolific and diverse tradition of such objects in human history and their treatment as a group represents an unusual interpretative opportunity. Stone vessels offer important analytical advantages over other classes of material, making them a favourable vantage from which to consider concepts of object value and how they might be approached in the archaeological record. Although comparative longitudinal studies like this one are increasingly rare, they provide a clarity which a narrower focus does not and are the type of contribution to the social sciences that archaeology is particularly well placed to provide. The following discussion addresses why a seemingly straightforward object-based analysis might offer wider archaeological insight, especially with regard to object value. It then goes on to justify the scope and coverage of the book before setting some relevant terms for comparative analysis. Finally, it outlines the main focus of each the succeeding chapters.

Stone vessels offer interpretative advantages over most other classes of material culture for at least five reasons: (1) their virtual indestructibility, (2) the subtractive properties of stone, (3) the potential for macroscopic, petrographic, or geochemical provenancing, (4) their numbers and regional diversity within the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean, and (5) their flexible range of values and functions.

The last two chapters considered some general approaches to value and then concentrated on the subject of eastern Mediterranean trade. This chapter is yet more specific, looking closely at the details of how stone vessels are made. Production strategies are not simply a sum total of local technical knowledge but are steeped in local values. Working stone into vessels involves balancing a variety of sometimes conflicting priorities and parameters: the properties of the stone, the availability of specific tools, a preference for particular designs, the intended quality of the finished product, and acceptable levels of accidental breakage. In any given cultural context, this balance will reflect both some conscious, strategic choices on the part of the artisan and the inertia of an inherited crafting tradition (for a similar perspective on potting, see Gosselain 2000).

Both short-term decisions and longer-term traditions can be interrogated for how they reflect value-led priorities and stone objects offer particularly rich opportunities for such analysis (though chipped stone has hitherto received most of the limelight: Renfrew and Zubrow 1994). Stone-working is a subtractive process, one which begins with a raw lump and gradually reduces it to a finished artefact by removing fragments, usually in a carefully ordered sequence. Telltale traces of these production stages are often well preserved both on half-finished objects and on final products. Understanding the details of such sequences casts light on a whole range of producer and consumer-driven interests.

The following three chapters look more closely at the stone vessel traditions of the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean. Each one is organised by region proceeding from Egypt to the Aegean in a roughly anticlockwise direction. This chapter looks at stone vessels in the third millennium, the period during which many of the areas concerned begin to come into more intense contact with each other. The date ranges are chosen for convenience only and, though some sociopolitical patterns do correlate with these divisions, many stone vessel traditions discussed here begin earlier or persist until later on. As a result, some prefacing of the discussion with earlier developments or reiteration of details in later chapters is inevitable but has been limited to topics where arbitrary division might otherwise obscure the argument.

Egypt

The Pre-Third Millennium Background

An obvious place to begin a survey of this kind is with the earliest evidence for Egyptian stone vessels, the most prolific and long-lived industry in the eastern Mediterranean. The first Egyptian vessels attested in Lower Egypt are made of limestone, basalt, and metasiltstone and are found in the southern Delta in late fifth- to early fourth-millennium BC farming settlements such as el Omari and Merimda (Debono and Mortensen 1990: pl. 14.5, 29.3–6; Eiwanger 1988: pls. 57.1173–4). These are just one of a number of artefact types, including figurines, maceheads, and palettes that suggest limited craft specialisation and the emergence of a wider set of social roles.

This chapter shifts away from theories of value to concentrate on understanding the movement of material culture around the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean. It places the study of stone vessels in a wider exchange and consumption context and in so doing declares a particular theoretical and empirical perspective on how we should go about reconstructing the importance of interregional contact in a pre– and protohistoric context. The discussion begins by exploring the Mediterranean environment and how Bronze Age people and objects might travel around it, before then considering the conceptual models with which modern commentators have approached Bronze Age trade, through which the most frequent and important fault line is the extent to which premodern economies can and should be distinguished from modern, capitalist ones. In this respect, we find it hard to assign priority to a range of types and scales of explanation for the movement of objects, just as we sometimes struggle to know how the picture presented by the archaeological record must be calibrated up or down to capture the real quantity, variety, and significance of material moving about. The final three sections address the third, earlier and later second millennia BC more directly and explore how specific flows of material integrated or distinguished different areas at different times.

The preceding chapters have covered a large area and an extended period of time to make some explanatory links across the whole Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean. This chapter takes such a comparative approach to its logical conclusion by considering, albeit rapidly, the roles played by stone vessel traditions across the world and throughout human history. In this regard, it is important to explore comparisons not only with other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern stone vessel industries but also with those in wholly separate parts of the world, so that we can distinguish patterns of convergent usage driven by similar conditions from those that are part of an inherited or diffused cultural tradition. In other words, while such a perspective cannot hope to be comprehensive, it aims to distinguish the smooth cross-cultural themes and those rougher idiosyncrasies specific to the cultural development of the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean.

Figure 8.1 presents the result of a literature search on pre-twentieth century stone vessel industries across the world, ignoring simple mortars and palettes. No doubt, it is very far from complete and reflects a degree of investigative bias in favour of regions close to the eastern Mediterranean, but it nonetheless suggests that such objects have a very wide geographic distribution.

Chapter 5 charted the production and consumption of stone vessels in a rapidly changing environment in which new production methods, luxury materials, and transport technologies were all becoming available. The very end of this period is notable for the low fidelity of our surviving material record across the entire region and for the impression of socioeconomic dislocation in many areas. Despite this apparent discontinuity, many of the patterns we observe in the later third millennium persist into the second: metal remained the dominant, high-value material and we can see the effects of its preeminence in the skeuomorphic character of other media and in the altered ways in which stone vessels adapted to a wider suite of prestige products. The eastern Mediterranean was now firmly tied together by long-range maritime and land-based routes that encouraged an intensified exchange of ideas as well as goods.

In the Levant, the reemergence of stone vessel use at Byblos and elsewhere followed a pattern established in the EBA, changing into something recognisably different only later on. In the northern Levant and Anatolia, we glimpse some intriguing practices and patterns associated with the very upper levels of society and driven by an increasingly shared set of prestige markers. In the Aegean, the earlier second millennium marked the appearance of palaces, writing and a highly stratified society on Crete.

as a student of architecture at virginia tech traveling in Italy in 1985, I became fascinated with the ancient brick walls that had obviously inspired one of my favorite architects, Louis Kahn. He had visited Rome as a Resident at the American Academy in 1950, and later much of his work was designed around themes of brick arches. The arches in Roman architecture, and particularly the relieving arches inserted into solid walls, captured my imagination. I wondered what secret reasons the Romans had for scattering these elements throughout their buildings. At the time, I was inspired by what I saw as the Roman “honesty” in their use of materials, though I now realize they were probably not remotely interested in this modernist concept. (I have also come to admit that I like most Roman buildings as ruins much better than I would have liked them in their original state.) On my return from the study abroad program, I convinced my architecture professor, Dennis Kilper, to supervise an independent study project on Roman concrete construction, the final product of which would be an illustrated paper. In the end, it was based largely (if not exclusively) on information from Vitruvius and M. E. Blake, and the illustrations were never completed. In the present work, I hope to have remedied the shortcomings of that first project begun two decades ago.

I have been fortunate to work with people who have provided the intellectual grounding to tackle the problems that interest me.

Stone or brick arches built into roman concrete vaults are called “ribs,” but unlike the ribs in Gothic vaulting the Roman ones are usually flush with the intrados and would not have been visible once the vault was decorated. Vaulting ribs often have been discussed in works on Roman construction, yet they have rarely been studied systematically in terms of form, use, and context. Many of the most authoritative scholars on the subject were writing at a time when a number of important monuments had not been properly dated or, in some cases, even excavated. Recent studies on individual monuments such as the Colosseum, the Forum of Caesar, Trajan's Markets, the Baths of Caracalla, and a series of late Roman domes need to be put into a developmental context before we can understand why the ribs were used and how they changed over time. The development of the ribs in vaulting is closely connected with the use of relieving arches over openings in walls, so the two techniques are discussed together.

In the past, scholars of Roman architecture have disagreed about the role that ribs and relieving arches play within the fabric of the concrete structure. Some have asserted that once the concrete cured, the relieving arch or rib became part of the hardened mass and no longer acted independently to divert loads or to reinforce the concrete, whereas others have assigned them a more active role in the channeling of loads through the hardened mass of the concrete even after the curing of the mortar.