Handmade Burnished Ware and the Late Bronze Age of the Balkans

Authors

  • H. Arthur Bankoff Brooklyn College, CUNY
  • Nathan Meyer University of California Berkeley
  • Mark Stefanovich American University in Bulgaria

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jmea.v9i2.193

Keywords:

handmade burnished ware, Mycenea, ceramic

Abstract

Handmade Burnished Ware from late Mycenaean contexts has been interpreted variously as a unified ceramic assemblage, a conflation of different indigenous coarse-ware traditions, evidence for intrusive ethnic elements in the Mycenaean world, a symptom of the economic and systemic decline of the palace elite, and the re-emergence of the Aegean peasant substrata as the destructions of the Late Bronze Age took their toll. The authors propose that it may represent the ceramic tradition of people brought into Greece from the Balkans and other areas beyond the Mycenaean periphery, and could be investigated through comparison with models developed in the New World and through the study of the technology of production.

Author Biographies

  • H. Arthur Bankoff, Brooklyn College, CUNY
    H. Arthur Bankoff is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology of Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He received his undergraduate education at that institution (BA 1975) and his PhD from Harvard University (1974). He has directed excavations in the United States of America, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, and has done fieldwork in other parts of Southeastern Europe and the Near East. Bankoff's research interests include interregional connections in the southeast European Bronze Age, and urban archaeology. Currently he is Fieldwork Director for the Combined Caesarea Expeditions (Israel).
  • Nathan Meyer, University of California Berkeley
    Nathan Meyer is a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Department at the University of California at Berkeley; he also holds a Master of Arts in Classical and Near Eastern Art and Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College as well as a Masters in Information Science from the School of Information Science at the University of California at Berkeley. Meyer's research interests are the philosophy of archaeology, methods for regional survey research, and archaeological informatics. Current field research includes regional survey projects in Greece and Cyprus.
  • Mark Stefanovich, American University in Bulgaria
    Mark Stefanovich is Associate Professor in the Southeast European Studies program of the American University in Bulgaria. He received undergraduate and graduate degrees in archaeology at the University of Belgrade, and PhD in Indo-European Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Stefanovich has excavated and directed archaeological projects in Germany, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. His current research encompasses the study of ethnicity past and present, and the archaeology of prehistoric and protohistoric southeastern Europe.

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Published

1997-04-01

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 2 (1996)

Section

Articles

License

© Equinox Publishing Ltd.

For information regarding our Open Access policy, click here.

How to Cite

Bankoff, H. A., Meyer, N., & Stefanovich, M. (1997). Handmade Burnished Ware and the Late Bronze Age of the Balkans. Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, 9(2), 193-209. https://doi.org/10.1558/jmea.v9i2.193