Abstrakt
Paper aims at typologically analysing collected bronze objects from the area of the lower part of East Aegean-West Anatolian Interface in the Late Bronze Age and compare them to the contemporary finds on Crete. The concept the Interface was defined by Mountjoy in 1998, was based on ceramics, settlements and funeral activities and argued that the territory differs from the neighbouring power centres such as Crete, Greek Mainland and Central Anatolia.
In this paper, only the lower part of the Interface will be discussed, which includes Dodecanese islands and the adjacent Anatolian coast, up to Miletus. Metallurgy of 2nd Millennium B.C. in the whole Interface was not sufficiently dealt yet with.
At first, the typology of metal finds such as swords, daggers, razors and similar will be briefly defined for Crete. In the second step the character of the Lower Interface finds will be represented and in the final step, the two sets will be compared.
In the Lower interface, swords seem to be in many cases more or less same as in Crete. However, same Dodekanese swords of type B appear more likely to be a "transitional" type between Karo's type B and Sandars' type C.
The only really unique type is type H or the so called Siana group, which seems to occur only along the Interface and represents interesting mixture of Aegean and near eastern influences. As for knives, the situation might be same, only unique type could be the type also called in this work Siana, based on same long tang on haft for fixation of pommel, as the Siana swords have.
Types of spears follow the same typology as those from Crete, although same might appear to be locally produced, especially in the Dodekanese area. The same situation could be for razors, where some of them show slightly typological differences.
The character of bronze items differs in Lower Interface with stronger Minoan-Mycenaean influence from items in Upper Interface which seems to be following more Anatolian features.