What remains when contact breaks off? Survival of knowledge and techniques in material culture of the peripheral regions of the Hittite Empire after its dissolution

The last centuries of the 2nd Millennium BC in the Near East are characterized by the collapse of the Late Bronze Age polity and by the disintegration of its economic system. Nonetheless, recent research carried out in Anatolia allowed to reconsider the decay of the Hittite Empire as a slow process of internal weakening and power decentralisation instead of an abrupt catastrophe. With the disappearance of the centralised power and the loss of the administrative role of ?attu?a, new independent political entities were able to flourish in some regions at the edges of the Hittite core. This paper analyses the survival of the Hittite material culture into the 12th-10th Century BC through assemblages of some of these southern and south-eastern Anatolian sites. Its goal is to inspect the residual manifestations of this long-lasting cultural and material interaction, clarifying the weight and significance of a phenomenon that occurred in a period marked by the decline of long-range political relations