The art of the exchange

This paper is devoted to the tentative of clarifying and discussing some basic methodological steps necessary in the analysis of figured objects. In particular, those objects carrying stylistic features not consistent with the local ancestral “way of doing things”; those objects, then, which we usually place within the fan of the two possible, as well as plausible, conceptual categories: imports or local products imitating foreign prototypes. Iron Age Crete provides a good laboratory and study-case in order to try a reconstruction of the style’s role and meaning being artistic production of the first centuries of the 1st millennium some sort of mixture of local and foreign features. In particulare, a figured bronze head-vase, studied by me in 2014 at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford will be analysed.