Middle and Late Bronze Age Metal Tools from the Aegean, Eastern ...

of the Mycenaean palatial system in the Aegean and the destruction and/or abandonment
of Anatolian, Cypriot and Syro-Palestinian sites are difficult to explain. Yet historical,
economic and social events may not have caused the proliferation of hoards at the
conclusion of the LBA.
Customary arguments assert that Aegean and eastern Mediterranean hoards were
deposited by individuals who stockpiled metal fragments as a means of hoarding wealth
when instability prevailed. The employment of any political-economic scenario as the
primary means for interpreting hoards is simplistic and hard to accept, especially for
those caches with insufficient contextual details. Such approaches ostensibly corroborate
perceptions of social turmoil. This methodology, however, is widely championed and was
most recently applied by Soles to Neopalatial caches on Crete: “In times of conflict
people often bury their most valuable possessions below ground, and these [Mochlos]
hoards indicate just such a time of conflict, when their owners made a quick get away,
expecting to return, but were unable ever to do so.” 602 This political-historical approach
must be used with caution, as Harding implies: “The assumption that political unrest led
to the practice of burying metal in the ground might be thought to derive support from the
fact that hoards concentrate in particular periods…[such as] examples from Hungary,
Germany…In other areas such connections are tenuous.” 603
Unstable social conditions
prevent the recovery of a hoard rather than causing its deposition. In other words, turmoil
in a society ensures a hoard’s preservation in the archaeological record but is not
necessarily the reason for the hoard’s formation. The usefulness of the historical-
602 Soles 2008, 156.
603 Harding 2000, 355.
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