The Pottery of Tel Esur, a Rural Canaanite Late Bronze Age Site on the Via Maris

Object Biographies, Object Agency and a Local Community's Encounter with and Response to Foreign Commodities: The Pithoi from LB Tel Burna as a Case Study

“…Furthermore, imitations of Cypriot pithoi in which potters in the southern Levant used local clay to make pithoi mimicking the morphology of the Cypriot forms have occasionally been found, but in general were rare (e.g. at Tel Esur; Shalvi et al 2019).…”

“…The many Cypriot and later Mycenaean imports to the Levant are a product of this, and the typical maritime transport container for international commerce of the LB was of a Levantine form, many of which were produced locally on southern Levantine soil (Broodbank 2013, 379-80;Demesticha & Knapp 2016;Knapp 2018a, 135-8;Pedrazzi 2016, 57-77). 2 Relevant for this study, LB sites in the southern Levant are typified by a lack of pithoi (Bonfil 1992, 31;Raban 2001;Shalvi et al 2019), excluding perhaps the northern inland valley region of the Jordan River Valley, where the site of Hazor had many very large pithoi in use throughout the LB (Bechar 2017, 222-3). This is in stark contrast to the Middle Bronze Age (MB, hereafter), when there is evidence for their widespread use throughout the region.…”