Economy & Trade in the Later Bronze Age Aegean and East Mediterranean Prof. John F. Cherry

Mondays 3-5:20 pm (M Hour)

70 Waterman St., Room 203
Course wiki : http://proteus.brown.edu/bronzeageeconomy/Home
Contact information:

Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World & Dept. of Classics

Office: 70 Waterman St., Room 301. Phone: (o) 401-863-6412

E-mail: john_cherry@brown.edu

Office hours: Tuesday 2-4 pm or by appointment.
Scope and goals of the seminar

This graduate seminar has as its temporal scope the period from the rise of the Mycenaean palaces on the Greek mainland until the end of the Bronze Age (ca. 1600-1100 BC) and, while focusing primarily on Greece and the Aegean, will be concerned more generally with the whole Eastern Mediterranean, including Crete, Cyprus, Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt. We will begin with a detailed examination of the workings of the Mycenaean palace economy, including the evidence of the Linear B documents, as well as strictly archaeological material. The seminar will then move to a more inclusive consideration of trade and exchange involving Aegean states and their counterparts further east; this will involve study of documentary evidence, patterns of artefact distribution, key site-types (such as shipwrecks), and the application of scientific methods for establishing provenance and exchange. A final goal is to contextualize such evidence by examining the nature and extent of cultural interaction between Aegean states and those further east during the later Bronze Age.