The External Contacts of Cyprus in the Late Bronze Age on the basis of the Ceramic Evidence

The society of the kingdom of Alašiya, the island of Cyprus, was one of the most widely and intensely connected ones in the Mediterranean during the later 2nd millennium BCE. In our paper, we will try to follow the threads of those connections by means of chemical and typological pottery analyses conducted on the ceramics from three coastal settlements. We focus on Énkomi in the east, Pýla-Kokkinókremos in the southeast and Maa-Palaeókastro in the southwest of the island. The material we analyzed covers a time span from LC IIC (Enkomi, Level IIIA; Pyla; perhaps Maa, Floor II), through LC IIIA (Enkomi, Levels IIIA and early IIIB; Maa, Floors II and I) until LC IIIB (Enkomi, later Level IIIB and Level IIIC). For the chemical analysis, we applied NAA (neutron activation analysis). Fortunately, a large number of comparative data produced by the Bonn laboratory for many sites all around Cyprus is already published (Mountjoy & Mommsen 2015; Mountjoy & Mommsen 2019). While these comparative data mainly refer to Mycenaean, local Mycenaean and Mycenaeanizing pots, the data we are discussing in this paper come from a broader spectrum of Late Bronze Age ceramics, both of local and non-Cypriot origin. The pottery classes we took into consideration are broadly representative of the many different categories, the Cypriot population was producing, importing and using throughout those two centuries.