Hybridity,Hapiru, and Ethnicity in 2nd MillenniumBCEWestern Asia 153There is a scholarly consensus that the appearance of Aegean-style material culture
in the southern coastal plain of Canaan marks the large-scale arrival, or colonization,
of new groups of peoples, which can be identified as the biblical Philistines. However,
much debate surrounds the ethnicity of these newcomers. Early studies of the Philistines
emphasized Aegean connections, leading to somewhat simplistic notions of large-scale
migrations from the west Aegean, specifically the Mycenaean Greek world. More
recent analyses of the archaeological record, which include a myriad of new excava-
tions in the eastern Mediterranean, reveal a far more complex and multi-directional
cultural and socioeconomic interaction between east and west, with locally produced,
Aegean-inspired assemblages appearing in the east Aegean, Cilicia, the Amuq Plain,
Cyprus, and the Levant during the thirteenth and twelfth centuriesBCE(see Killebrew
2014; Killebrew and Lehmann 2013 for a discussion of the various views).
The Philistine phenomenon is only one among the many expressions of change that
resulted from the instability and fluidity that defined this period of time (Bachhuber
and Roberts 2009). Approaches to understanding the development of regionally defined
Aegean-style assemblages in the eastern Mediterranean include small- and large-scale
migrations, stimulus and complex diffusion, creolization, hybridity, interculturality, trans-
culturalism, and Levantinism (e.g., Killebrew 2005a: 197–246, 2013b; Knapp 2008;
Hitchcock 2011; Maeir, Hitchcock and Kolska Horwitz 2013). Locally contextualized
and considered on a case-by-case basis, these are all processes or factors that may have
played a role in the individual ethnogenesis and formation of a multitude of new ethnic-
ities, which emerge from the ruins of the Late Bronze Age during the final centuries of
the late second millenniumBCE.
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Bahrani, Zainab. 2006. “Race and Ethnicity in Mesopotamian Antiquity.”World Archaeology,
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Ben-Shlomo, David. 2006.Decorated Philistine Pottery: An Archaeological and Archaeometric
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Ben-Shlomo, David, Itzhaq Shai, Alexander Zukerman and Aren M. Maeir. 2008. “Cooking Iden-
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