Pottery Traditions of the Later Hittite Empire: Problems of Definition Ulf-Dietrich SCHOOP The original aim of this paper as it was to be delivered at this conference had been to give a summary on what is known about the latest Hittite pottery inventories dating just before the fall of the empire and the onset of the following Dark Age in Central Anatolia. This seemed to be a fairly easy task as the history of research on Hittite material culture stretches now over almost a hundred years and a good portion of the published assemblages has been dated into these late times, i.e. the 13 th century BC. Although it may be rather disappointing in the context of this workshop, I want to show here that quite to the contrary there are many open questions connected with the chronology of Hittite material culture, some of them deeply rooted in the original approach to this material. 1 General problems in the formulation of the Hittite pottery Sequence As the framework of our understanding of Hittite pottery development has been formulated mainly using evidence from the capital Bo¤azköy-Hattusha, the following remarks are centred on this place. Here we seem to have the most complete sequence of all the Hittite settlements excavated so far. As many graphical displays (cf. fig. 2) indicate there appears to exist an unbroken sequence running from the final Early Bronze Age through to the end of the Hittite Empire period. The pottery of the different inventories of which the sequence consists has been published by Franz Fischer (1963) in the 1960s already. For other newly found complexes - at Bo¤azköy itself or at other places - the only duty remaining, as far as pottery dating is concerned, seemed to find the respective parallels given by Fischer and to match the new assemblage with one of those represented at Bo¤azköy. This, in fact, can be considered as almost the normal approach in Hittite pottery dating over the last decades. There did not arise any serious problems until very recently. Before we move to the question why this has been so, it may be useful to have a look at the presumptions under which the Bo¤azköy chronology has been constructed by Kurt Bittel (Bittel – Naumann 1938: 5-11) and Fischer, the last basically following the former in this respect. We may do so under two different points of view, the one referring to the conceptual framework under which the sequence was formulated, the other to the more factual properties of the concerned assemblages of material culture. 1 I am very grateful to Dr. Jürgen Seeher, who gave me the opportunity to work on the Hittite pottery from his excavations at Bo¤azköy since 1994. Many helpful insights originate from long discussions with him and Dr. Hermann Genz about the chrono- logical and stratigraphical problems connected with this material.