This short chapter draws together some interpretative loose ends raised by the preceding analyses but more importantly revisits the wider issue of how we might use stone vessels to consider the ways in which objects are valued in Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean societies. It concludes the book by considering first what happens to the Bronze Age stone vessel traditions in the altered circumstances of the first millennium BC and then returns to some of the theoretical challenges raised in Chapter 2. Finally, it suggests some directions in which future research might lead.

After the Bronze Age

The severe dislocation of existing elite power structures that occurred in most areas of the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age brought with it a decline, or in many cases the complete disappearance, of elite-sponsored crafts such as wall-painting, monument building, gold, faience, and ivory work (e.g. Peltenburg 2002; Sherratt 2003). Upper elite manufacture of stone vessels in exotic rocks also collapses, reappearing only much later in a Persian predilection for stone vessels to go alongside their precious metal tableware (Cahill 1985: 382–3; Amiet 1983). More broadly, however, different stone vessel industries responded in different ways to these disruptions, reflecting the varying points at which they had been inserted into the existing social and economic hierarchy.