This graduate seminar has as its temporal scope the period from the rise of the Mycenaean palaces on the Greek mainland until the end of the Bronze Age (ca. 1600-1100 BC) and, while focusing primarily on Greece and the Aegean, will be concerned more generally with the whole Eastern Mediterranean, including Crete, Cyprus, Anatolia, the Levant and Egypt. We will begin with a detailed examination of the workings of the Mycenaean palace economy, including study of some Linear B documents in transliteration, as well as strictly archaeological material. The seminar will then to move to a more inclusive consideration of trade and exchange involving Aegean states and their counterparts further east; this will involve study of documentary evidence, patterns of artifact distribution, key site-types (such as shipwrecks), and the application of scientific methods for establishing provenance and exchange. We will conclude with an attempt to contextualize such evidence by examining the nature and extent of cultural interaction between Aegean states and those further east during the later Bronze Age.