Trojan pottery across the Bronze/Iron Age boundary

TROY POTTERY HOLDS A KEY TO THE GREAT BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE

Before the sack of Troy, the city looked east towards the powerful Hittite Empire. But this political powerhouse collapsed around the time that Troy was destroyed. Grave says the post-conflict pottery is Balkan in style because the Trojans were keen to align themselves with the people there, who had become the new political elite and powerbase in the region.

The collapse of the Late Bronze Age political and economic structures of the eastern Mediterranean undercut elite production spheres serving this network at Troy.

The people of Early Iron Age Troy shifted their focus to elaborating their own household ceramic traditions to re-establish their role in newly configured social and economic networks that now looked to the Balkans rather than the Hittite Anatolia.

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Journal of Archaeological Science Available online 12 November 2012

Cultural dynamics and ceramic resource use at Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age Troy, northwestern Turkey

Peter Grave et al.

Changes in resource use over time can provide insight into technological choice and the extent of long term stability in cultural practices. In this paper we re-evaluate the evidence for a marked demographic shift at the inception of the Early Iron Age at Troy by applying a robust macroscale analysis of changing ceramic resource use over the Late Bronze and Iron Age. We use a combination of new and legacy analytical datasets (NAA and XRF), from excavated ceramics, to evaluate the potential compositional range of local resources (based on comparisons with sediments from within a 10 kilometer site radius). Results show a clear distinction between sediment-defined local and non-local ceramic compositional groups. Two discrete local ceramic resources have been previously identified and we confirm a third local resource for a major class of EIA handmade wares and cooking pots. This third source appears to derive from a residual resource on the Troy peninsula (rather than adjacent alluvial valleys). The presence of a group of large and heavy pithoi among the non-local groups raises questions about their regional or maritime origin.

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