© 2015 American Schools of Oriental Research. BASOR 374 (2015): 75–102. On the Origin of Iron Age Phoenician Ceramics at Kommos, Crete: Regional and Diachronic Perspectives across the Bronze Age to Iron Age Transition Ayelet Gilboa, Paula Waiman-Barak, and Richard Jones Excavations at Kommos, Crete, have unearthed hundreds of fragments of Iron Age Levantine transport jars—an unusual phenomenon in the Iron Age Mediterranean. Tough usually termed “Phoenician,” their origin has never been demonstrated by fabric analysis. Tis article presents such an analysis, employing petrography and chemistry. To a large extent, this is a rather unex- plored domain because fabric analyses of Phoenician Iron Age ceramics overseas are surprisingly few. Te compositional data indicate that most of the jars are indeed from Lebanon, specifcally from its southern coast. To place these results in a diachronic and regional perspective, we dis- cuss the chronology of these fnds and then compare the production centers identifed with those defned in other provenance studies of Levantine containers overseas. Tis illustrates the growing importance of southern Lebanese polities in Iron Age Mediterranean networks at the expense of the Syrian littoral, on the one hand, and the coast of the southern Levant, on the other. Keywords: Iron Age; Phoenician trade; Phoenician pottery; Mediterranean trade; ceramic analysis; petrography; optical mineralogy; atomic absorption spectrometry; Kommos Ayelet Gilboa: University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel, agilboa@research.haifa.ac.il Paula Waiman-Barak: University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel, paula76w@yahoo.com Richard Jones: Archaeology, School of Humanities, Univer- sity of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK, Richard.Jones@glasgow.ac.uk Introduction Kommos and the Phoenicians E xcavations by J. W. Shaw and M. C. Shaw at Kommos on the southern coast of Crete have revealed hun- dreds of fragments of Iron Age Levantine transport jars, almost unanimously thought to originate in Phoenicia. Tis is a rather unusual phenomenon for the Iron Age. As opposed to the last centuries of the Late Bronze Age, when numerous Levantine (so-called Canaanite) jars are fairly well attested in various regions around the Mediterranean, 1 1 See the summary and references in Killebrew 2005: 145. See also Cline 1994: 168–79; Crewe 2007: 16, 124–25; Pedrazzi 2007; and see below. the harvest for the Iron Age is rather poor. Levantine trans- port jars certainly reached Cyprus and Egypt throughout the Iron Age, 2 but nothing compares with the quantities at Kommos. Currently, there is very little evidence that Levantine transport jars traveled farther west. 3 Another major discovery at Kommos usually associated with the Phoenicians is the “tri-pillar” shrine unearthed there. Te proposed identifcation of this edifce as a Phoenician or 2 For Cyprus in general, see Bikai 1987. For early Iron Age Cy- prus, see Pedrazzi 2007; and Gilboa, Sharon, and Boaretto 2008. For Tird Intermediate Period Egypt, see, e.g., Aston 1996: fgs. 64:400, 110:XLIII/105, 111:XLIII/246, 168:J. 3 In Phoenician holdings in the West during the eighth and sev- enth centuries, transport jars that seem, according to their shape, to originate in Phoenicia proper are present but very rare, and their exact provenance has yet to be established (e.g., Ruíz Mata 1999: pls. 12:8, 9; 13, second from bottom; Maas-Lindemann 2000: fg. 2–1:4). Inter alia, it is unclear whether any of the numerous Phoenician-style containers found at Huelva on Iberia’s Atlantic coast may be of eastern Mediter- ranean manufacture (González de Canales Cerisola, Serrano Pichardo, and Llompart Gómez 2004). For their disputed date, see, e.g., Gilboa, Sharon, and Boaretto 2008. For the possibility that jars were shipped from Philistia to the West in the seventh century, see, e.g., Stager, Mas- ter, and Schloen 2011: 88. This journal was published by the American Schools of Oriental Research and is available on JSTOR at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication?journalCode=bullamerschoorie. You may receive the journal through an ASOR membership or subscription. See http://www.asor.org/membership/individual.html for more information.