In the past, Bronze Age painted plaster in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean has been studied from a range of different but isolated viewpoints. This volume brings both technological and iconographic approaches closer together by completing certain gaps in the literature on technology and by investigating how and why technological transfer has developed and what broader impact this had on the wider social dynamics of the late Middle and Late Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean. This study approaches the topic of painted plaster by a multidisciplinary methodology and demonstrates the human forces through which transfer was enabled and how multiple social identities and the inter-relationships of these actors with each other and their material world were expressed through their craft production and organization. The investigated data from sixteen sites has been contextualized within a wider framework of Bronze Age interconnections both in time and space because studying painted plaster in the Aegean cannot be considered separate from similar traditions both in Egypt and in the Near East.
Ann Brysbaert is Senior Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Leiden.
"This book is an extremely important piece of research that opens up new vistas in the study of painted plaster in the ancient Aegean and its influence and appearance throughout the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age." - American Journal of Archaeology "The originality of the book relies on its subtitle, the 'painted plaster', where the author has to offer first-hand observations." - Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Ann Brysbaert