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Among the painted pottery types in the Levant during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., the "East Greek" class is especially conspicuous and usually assumed to have been produced in Ionia. This pottery is the subject of a comprehensive research project, examining it from typological, analytical, and other perspectives. Our conclusion is that the "East Greek" class comprises in fact several subgroups from various other parts of the Mediterranean. Here we discuss one of these groups, including mainly hydriai, table amphoras, and jugs, which we suggest were produced on Crete, specifically in the central part of the island. These are the first Cretan ceramics of this period attested anywhere off the island, and they provide the first hint that maritime routes then linked Crete with various eastern Mediterranean regions. This pottery can perhaps be understood as a proxy for the exchange of a wider array of commodities, a possibility addressed in the concluding section of this article. Since the conventional wisdom is that Crete was largely disconnected from the rest of the Mediterranean in the Classical period, both commercially and culturally, this discovery has important implications for Cretan history and more generally for tracing ancient Mediterranean interconnections. It also adds to our understanding of the ceramic repertoire of fifth- and fourth-century B.C.E. Crete, which is still rather poorly known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of an in-depth multidisciplinary restudy of small Metal Age surface scatters recorded in earlier fieldwalking surveys in northern Calabria (Italy). Guided by a stratified sampling approach based on site types and topographic positions, high-resolution surface collections at the selected sites were combined with geophysical surveys, test pits, and soil studies to investigate both archaeological deposits and the site formation processes that have an effect on their detectability. This approach is shown to result in a better definition of archaeological ‘sites’, and to help fill in details of regional exploitation and settlement dynamics at the landscape scale. At this broader scale we are also able to model post-depositional processes and slope dynamics affecting the preservation of the archaeological record. With regard to methodology, our study has enabled the evaluation of diverse archaeological detection methods and the fine-tuning of field strategies for the study of Metal Age remains. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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The village of Dja'de-el-Mughara (Northern Syria, excavated by E. Coqueugniot) is essential to understand the process of neolithisation in the Near East since the settlement was contemporary with the first attempts of agriculture in the area. Regarding that specific context, a key research direction to improve our knowledge of major technical and economic changes occurring in that crucial period is the functional study of the tools used by the inhabitants, more specifically their sickle blades (traditionally related to the glossy blades). This article deals with the various methodological aspects of this research on the one hand, and presents its first preliminary results on the other hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]