caa a22 4500 388110678 CHVBK 20180307125352.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199907 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S1380203800001318 doi S1380203800001318 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S1380203800001318 De Mita Francis A. The burden of being Mycenaean [Elektronische Daten] [Francis A. De Mita] Van Wijngaarden offers an important and instructive attempt to re-situate the study of Bronze Age ‘imports' away from the dominance of prestige commodity studies, using the particularly thorny example of Mycenaean ceramics. Traditional approaches, as van Wijngaarden points out, have tended to assign a uniformity of value and unchallenged prestige status to all Mycenaean imports. The reason for this reflexive recourse to prestige in the presence of Mycenaean pottery has more perhaps to do with the evolution of the discipline of archaeology in the East Mediterranean and a desire to find a precursor to the highly evolved city states of the Classical world than to any objective assessment of the objects themselves. Analytical frameworks which contextualize imports and exotica into the greater scheme of a robust and diverse material culture are critical steps in the development of the theoretical evolution of the study of the Late Bonze Age. However, van Wijngaarden's efforts also illustrate the methodological challenges encountered when isolating a single subcategory of artefact for examination. The blame lies not so much with van Wijngaarden's analysis as with the problem of what can be said to constitute value in a prehistoric context and how value, once defined, can be kept separate from other interrelated concepts. Copyright © The Author(s) 1999 Archaeological Dialogues Cambridge University Press 6/1(1999-07), 24-27 1380-2038 6:1<24 1999 6 ARD https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203800001318 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203800001318 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- De Mita Francis A. NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Archaeological Dialogues Cambridge University Press 6/1(1999-07), 24-27 1380-2038 6:1<24 1999 6 ARD CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge