Chapter 5 charted the production and consumption of stone vessels in a rapidly changing environment in which new production methods, luxury materials, and transport technologies were all becoming available. The very end of this period is notable for the low fidelity of our surviving material record across the entire region and for the impression of socioeconomic dislocation in many areas. Despite this apparent discontinuity, many of the patterns we observe in the later third millennium persist into the second: metal remained the dominant, high-value material and we can see the effects of its preeminence in the skeuomorphic character of other media and in the altered ways in which stone vessels adapted to a wider suite of prestige products. The eastern Mediterranean was now firmly tied together by long-range maritime and land-based routes that encouraged an intensified exchange of ideas as well as goods.

In the Levant, the reemergence of stone vessel use at Byblos and elsewhere followed a pattern established in the EBA, changing into something recognisably different only later on. In the northern Levant and Anatolia, we glimpse some intriguing practices and patterns associated with the very upper levels of society and driven by an increasingly shared set of prestige markers. In the Aegean, the earlier second millennium marked the appearance of palaces, writing and a highly stratified society on Crete.