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

etween craft production and gender has been overlooked partially because of inadequate
evidence from texts and iconography. Women are prominent within the Linear B records
either as priestesses or dependents of the palace, primarily for the textile industry. 79
Despite the association of females with textile working, gender responsibilities within
other craft activities are ambiguous. Iconography from New Kingdom Egypt depicts
males working with several crafts (ship construction, carpentry, metalworking, ceramic
production, etc.), yet the evidence is not as straightforward in other regions. Moreover,
iconography may reflect the ideal as opposed to reality. Marinatos thus observes that
women in Egyptian and Minoan painting are depicted as a “mother and nurturer.” 80 The
affiliation between gender and prehistoric ceramic production is addressed in Cypriot
scholarship. 81 Stewart argued that males in workshops produced Early Cypriot pottery;
on the other hand, Frankel explained regional similarities in Middle Cypriot motifs on
White Painted pottery as the result of mobile female potters. 82 Hankey hypothesized that
Late Cypriot potters were also female. Alternatively, Walz, focusing on ethnographic and
contemporaneous evidence from neighboring regions, concluded that female potters on
Cyprus were the exception rather than the rule during the LBA. 83 Recently, Clarke has
revisited archaeological assumptions between women and ceramic production; she uses
the Ceramic Neolithic period in Cyprus to demonstrate that the “diversity [in the
repertoire of motifs] is not the result of post-marital residence patterns…and that there is
absolutely no evidence to suggest that women were the sole producers of pottery.” 84
79
Nosch 2003, 13-18; Chadwick 1988; Deger-Jalkotazy 1972.
80
Marinatos 1995, 582.
81
London 2002.
82
Stewart 1961; Frankel 1974.
83
Hankey 1983; Walz 1985.
84
Clarke 2002, 261.
47