With a focus on the underwater context of sculptures retrieved from beneath the sea, this volume examines where, when, why and how sculptures were transported on the Mediterranean Sea during Classical Antiquity through the lenses of both maritime and classical archaeology.
Mediterranean Connections focuses on the origin and development of maritime transport containers from the Early Bronze through early Iron Age periods (ca. 3200–700 BC). Analysis of this category of objects broadens our understanding of ancient Mediterranean interregional connections, including the role that shipwrecks, seafaring, and coastal communities played in interaction and exchange. These containers have often been the subject of specific and detailed pottery studies, but have seldom been examined in the context of connectivity and trade in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. This broad study: considers the likely origins of these types of vessels; traces their development and spread throughout the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean as archetypal organic bulk cargo containers; discusses the wider impact on Mediterranean connections, transport and trade over a period of 2,500 years covering the Bronze and early Iron Ages. Classical and Near Eastern archaeologists and historians, as well as maritime archaeologists, will find this extensively researched volume an important addition to their library.
That seafaring was fundamental to Roman prosperity in the eastern Mediterranean is beyond doubt, but a tendency by scholars to focus on the grandest long-distance movements between major cities has obscured the finer and varied contours of maritime interaction. This book offers a nuanced archaeological analysis of maritime economy and connectivity in the Roman east. Drawing together maritime landscape studies and network analysis, Roman Seas takes a bottom-up view of the diverse socioeconomic conditions and seafaring logistics that generated multiple structures and scales of interaction. The material record of shipwrecks and ports along a vital corridor from the southeast Aegean across the northeast Mediterranean provides a case study of regional exchange and communication based on routine sails between simple coastal harbors. Rather than a single well-integrated and persistent Mediterranean network, multiple discrete and evolving regional and interregional systems emerge. This analysis sheds light on the cadence of economic life along the coast, the development of market institutions, and the regional continuities that underpinned integration-despite imperial fragmentation-between the second century BCE and the seventh century CE. Roman Seas advances a new approach to the synthesis of shipwreck and other maritime archaeological and historical economic data, as well as a path through the stark dichotomies-either big commercial voyages or small-scale cabotage-that inform most paradigms of Roman connectivity and trade. The result is a unique perspective on ancient Mediterranean trade, seafaring, cultural interaction, and coastal life.
This book uses network ideas to explore how the sea connected communities across the ancient Mediterranean. We look at the complexity of cultural interaction, and the diverse modes of maritime mobility through which people and objects moved. It will be of interest to Mediterranean specialists, ancient historians, and maritime archaeologists.
Mediterranean Connections focuses on the origin and development of maritime transport containers from the Early Bronze through early Iron Age periods (ca. 3200-700 BC). Analysis of this category of objects broadens our understanding of ancient Mediterranean interregional connections, including the role that shipwrecks, seafaring, and coastal communities played in interaction and exchange. These containers have often been the subject of specific and detailed pottery studies, but have seldom been examined in the context of connectivity and trade in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. This broad study: considers the likely origins of these types of vessels; traces their development and spread throughout the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean as archetypal organic bulk cargo containers; discusses the wider impact on Mediterranean connections, transport and trade over a period of 2,500 years covering the Bronze and early Iron Ages. Classical and Near Eastern archaeologists and historians, as well as maritime archaeologists, will find this extensively researched volume an important addition to their library.
Maritime Archaeology and Ancient Trade in the Mediterranean comprises twelve papers that look at the shifting patterns of maritime trade as seen through archaeological evidence across the economic cycle of Classical Antiquity. Papers range from an initial study of Egyptian ship wrecks dating from the sixth to fifth century BC from the submerged harbour of Heracleion-Thonis through to studies of connectivity and trade in the eastern Mediterranean during the Late Antique period. The majority of the papers, however, focus on the high point in ancient maritime trade during the Roman period and examine developments in shipping, port facilities and trading routes.
When thinking about the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel's haunting words resound like an echo of the sea and its millenary history. From Prehistory until today, the Mediterranean has been setting, witness and protagonist of mythical adventures, of encounters with the Other, of battles and the rise and fall of cultures and empires, of the destinies of humans. Braudel's appeal for a long durée history of the Mediterranean challenged traditional views that often present it as a sea fragmented and divided through periods. This volume proposes a journey into the bright and dark sides of the ancient Mediterranean through the kaleidoscopic gaze of artists who from the Renaissance to the 21st century have been inspired by its myths and history. The view of those who imagined and recreated the past of the sea has largely contributed to the shaping of modern cultures which are inexorably rooted and embedded in Mediterranean traditions. The contributions look at modern visual reinterpretations of ancient myths, fiction and history and pay particular attention to the theme of sea travel and travellers, which since Homer's Odyssey has become the epitome of the discovery of new worlds, of cultural exchanges and a metaphor of personal developments and metamorphoses.
Ancient seafaring and especially our fascination with the trireme have fuelled many vooks and debates, many of which are revisited and critiqued here. Alec Tilley takes his lead from the evidence itself, whether depictions on pottery or stone, or literary references, and seeks some semblance of objectivity in a field of research that, he argues, frequently indulges itself in the subjectivity of the evidence. Critiquing previous interpretations of the iconography of seafaring, he looks again at some of the iconography of of the trireme and other warships, discusses the orthodoc trireme debate and especially the Olympias, a recent reconstruction of an Athenian trireme. Along the way he argues that the number in the name of ancient oared ship refered to the number of files of oarsmen, highlighting the fact that many of the ancient artists who depicted ships were knowledgeable about the subject they portrayed, presents thoughts on the development of sailing and draws a series of distinctions between different types of vessels, and reviews the corpus of evidence for seafaring from pre-trireme days to the Phoenicians.