288 tehmina goskarThe Bell Beaker culture, whose earliest testimony around 2800 bCe is in the Tagus
valley in Portugal, has, through its distinctive corded and banded pottery, defined
societies in regions as diverse as Sardinia and Scotland. Stretching back into the
Neolithic c. 6200–5900 bCe, the Cardium or Impressed Ware Pottery cultures appear
in several parts of Turkey, northern Syria, the Lebanon coast, Palestine and Tunisia
(Güldoğan, 2010). This distribution may give these shell, nail or stick-incised ceram-
ics a distinctly Mediterranean flavor, but more importantly, they allow for the kind of
close comparative study in style, taste, manufacture and decoration that is essential for
a meaningful understanding of an epistemologically Mediterranean object culture.
Debates about orientalism may be more familiar in medieval and modern history
but the concept has also been used in the study of the prehistoric Mediterranean. The
idea of orientalizing objects in the Bronze and Iron Ages is based largely on the grave
goods of the (presumed) elite of fourteenth-century bCe Cyprus, symbolic of their
need to buy into Near Eastern luxury objects such as faience, glass, ivory, carved
gems, jewelry, gold and silver metal ware and Mycenaean pottery, and partake in the
same semiotic system as their counterparts in Egypt and the Aegean littoral (Knapp,
2006: 50–55). The problem of analyzing grave goods as power and status displays is
that it obscures the biographies of their creation and circulation. A more compelling
dimension to Cyprus’s material culture in the late Bronze Age, which does not require
any geo-cultural labeling, was its copper industry.
Oxhide-shaped ingots produced in Alashiya (Cyprus) were for a time used as a unit
of currency in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as further west in Sicily,
Sardinia and Marseilles during the late Bronze Age (Knapp et al., 2001). It has been
further demonstrated through innovative quantitative analyses of archaeological and
textual evidence that the nature and scale of the eastern Mediterranean economy, in
which copper played a large part, was not “minimalist” but embedded in the “state”
institutions of Cyprus and Egypt (Padgham, 2008). Arguably it was copper that kick-
started the commercial trades and industries of the Mediterranean during the late
Bronze Age, and enabled the commodification and circulation of products that lasted
into the seventeenth century. Very recent comparative evidence has come from Serbia
with astonishing finds of prehistoric copper alloy tools over 7000 years old, evidence
of very early mining, and attempts at metallurgy dating to the early Neolithic (6400–
6300 bCe) (Antonvic, 2009: 165–167).́
New discoveries and investigations are actively transforming our ideas of prehis-
toric material culture and seriously challenge assertions that the evidence of metals
and metallurgy has been over-emphasized. Copper is infinitely recyclable and it is
estimated that 80% of copper ever mined is still in some use today. This property
alone suggests it should not be treated in the same way as textiles, ceramics or
foodstuffs as signifiers of redistribution in the Mediterranean. Oxhide ingots pro-
vided the raw material which would transform object cultures previously reliant on
stone, wood, bone and horn, from knives and arrowheads for hunting and fight-
ing, to needles and pins for textile and leather working. The search for industry in
the ancient world is not so absurd (Horden and Purcell, 2000: 346–51). The prod-
ucts of prehistoric itinerant merchant–craftsmen cannot simply be placed into a
general ghetto of Mediterranean redistribution and communication. The material
culturalist’s approach requires an understanding of the processes of production
and manufacture as well as the artifact.0002063960.INDD 288 2/17/2014 11:38:26 AM