Regional mineralogical and technological characterization of Cypriot Iron Age pottery: a view from Tel Dor

Abstract

Excavations at Tel Dor, a Phoenician site on the northern coast of Israel, produced one of the most varied and best-stratified assemblages of Cypriot Iron Age ceramics ever found outside Cyprus. A long-term investigation of the nature of socio-economic liaisons between Dor and Cyprus, inter alia, by identifying through ceramic typology and petrography the specific Cypriot production centres that sent their products to Dor is currently in progress. This paper focuses on the analytical identification of production centres first suggested by macroscopic observations; temporal trajectories and cultural implications are addressed only preliminarily. The results indicate that the Cypriot vessels that reached Dor were only produced at Salamis, Kition, Amathus and Paphos, and that the vista of imports at Dor keeps changing throughout the period under consideration. This is the most comprehensive analytical study of Cypriot Iron Age ceramic fabrics to date. It has the potential to build a foundation for provenance studies of Cypriot Iron Age ceramic fabrics and the interconnections they embody. It is constrained, however, by the fact it was mainly production centres represented at Dor that were studied.

Keywords:

• Iron Age
• Cyprus
• Tel Dor
• ceramic petrography
• connectivity
• Phoenicia

Acknowledgments

Financial support for this study was partly provided by the Israel Science Foundation (grant 209/14, awarded to Gilboa and to Shlomo Shoval, whom we thank for his collaboration in the initial steps of this research; and by the Research Authority of the University of Haifa. Georgiadou’s and Waiman-Barak’s work was enabled by Post-Doctoral Fellowships from the Research Authority of the University of Haifa and the Tel Dor Expedition (respectively during 2014 and 2017–2019). This research was made possible by permissions of the Israel Antiquities Authority; by Ilan Sharon (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) and S. Rebecca Martin (Boston University) co-directors of the Tel Dor project; and of several institutions and individuals in Cyprus: the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus and its former directors: Marina Solomidou-Ieronymidou and Despina Pilides; Vassos Karageorghis and Anna Satraki, archaeological officers at the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus, who allowed us to examine material from their excavations at Palaepaphos, and Kition and Idalion respectively. Sampling sediments in Cyprus was conducted by permission of the Cyprus Geological Survey Department and its present and former directors, Costantinos Costantinou and Eleni G. Morisseau, consolidated by a memorandum of understanding signed between the GCD and the University of Haifa. We also extend our gratitude to Vasiliki Kassianidou and Maria Dikomitou-Eliadou of the Archaeological Research Unit at the University of Cyprus, and to Zomenia Zomeni of the GCD for their help in realizing this project. Analytical work was conducted at the Laboratory for Materials in Archaeology, directed by Sariel Shalev, and the Laboratory for Sedimentary Archaeology, directed by Ruth Shahack-Gross, both of the Department of Maritime Civilizations and the Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences, University of Haifa. Shahack-Gross also supported the analyses of sediments. Technical assistance was provided by Jonathan J. Gottlieb, Golan Shalvi, Tanya Sokolsky, Michelle Creisher, and Nicole Constantine, all of the University of Haifa. The illustrations were compiled by PWB and by Sveta Matskevitch of Hebrew University. Lastly, we acknowledge the professional and conscientious comments of our editor, Zach Dunseth, who improved the paper considerably, and the critical reading of Maria Iacovou, the anonymous reviewers and the editors.

Supplementary material

Supplementary material for this article can be accessed here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00758914.2021.1972609.

Notes

1 The possibility that small sherds preserving only the ‘black’ colour might, in fact, be fragments of Bichrome vessels is noted.

2 Based mainly on a combination of NAA and FTIR analysis of ceramics collected by the Canadian Palaipaphos Survey Project, King (1987) suggested that a large proportion of the pottery he sampled in the Kouklia area was produced from clays from the Ezousa riverbed; yet these ceramics are of unknown dating.

3 Current interdisciplinary research is attempting to specify organizational aspects of regional pottery production throughout the Iron Age in the framework of an on-going research project, ‘Bringing Life to old Museum Collections: The interdisciplinary study of pottery from the Iron Age polities of Salamis, Soloi, Lapithos, Chytroi (MuseCo)’, (RESTART 2016-2020/Excellence/1216/0093), University of Cyprus, with principal investigators A. Georgiadou and M. Dikomitou-Eliadou.

4 Examined by PWB in the framework of the Hala Sultan Tekke excavations conducted by Peter Fischer and Teresa Bürge. See https://www.orea.oeaw.ac.at/en/research/mediterranean-economies/the-collapse-of-bronze-age-societies-in-the-eastern-mediterranean-sea-peoples-in-cyprus/. We thank the directors for allowing us to reference this information here.

5 High- and low-fired vessels could not be told apart visually. The only means to do so is by tapping on empty vessels and assessing their dull, or alternatively ‘clinky’ sound, generated inter alia by the well-sintered clay minerals (cf. Noghani and Emami 2014; Rice 1987).

6 The hoard also contains silver from the Taurus region in Anatolia.

7 A new commodity is now added — the flat-based mortaria — which will prevail until the end of the Iron Age. Plain wares are not part of the project reported here, but preliminary analysis conducted with Gunnar Lehmann on mortaria from various sites in the Levant indicate that they were produced in Salamis and Amathus, possibly also at Kition.

8 This observation does not apply to the northern Levant, particularly not to Al Mina (see Radner and Vacek 2020).

9 Notably, the absence of inland products differs from the situation in the Late Bronze Age. The few fabric analyses that were conducted on White Slip and Base Ring pottery outside Cyprus — in the Levant and in Crete (respectively Barkai 2003; Hacıosmanoğlu et al. 2018 and Tomlinson et al. 2010), demonstrated the meaningful occurrence of pottery from inland sites. Indeed, these wares, exported en masse to the Levant, were shown to have been inter alia produced in various locales on the slopes of the Troodos (Aloupi et al. 2001; Doherty and Gomez 2000; Hatcher 2007; Vaughan 1987; PWB, based on recent petrography at Hala Sultan Tekke).

10 More and more high-resolution petrographic data regarding Cypriot (and other) ceramics of various types and sites are being uploaded to the Levantine Ceramics Project (LCP) website (https://www.levantineceramics.org), intended to facilitate comparative studies.