Communities of Style

Book excerpt: This book focuses on the production and circulation of portable luxury goods in the early Iron Age (1200-600 BCE). The study is particularly interested in community formation as mediated by artthough not at the national level, as is customary with most studies of antiquity. Rather, it is concerned with the complex networks that gave rise to extended communities across a range of spaces near and far. It tells a story about many communities coming together, overlapping, interacting, and reforming through various relationships between human beings and objects. It studies these processes for the early Iron Age Levant (including present-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan), focusing on portable luxury arts, in particular ivories and metal works."