The seascape in Aegean Prehistory (original) (raw)

The Human Experience of Seafaring in Prehistoric Times

Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies, 2020

The majority of current research dealing with the maritime world is centered on abstract notions such as trade, networks, connectivity or the movement of objects. Yet, while these abstractions are useful and necessary, they often tend to neglect the people involved in seafaring activities and their experiences, contributing to the still dominant perception of the open sea as an empty space. This article seeks to address the human maritime experience as an intrinsic part of a seascape by tracing the specific experiences a sailor would have made out at sea. Based on an analysis of archaeological material derived from Late Bronze Age and Archaic shipwrecks from the eastern Mediterranean and incorporating comparative textual sources and iconography the article will attempt to shed light on particular aspects of maritime culture in prehistoric societies that are hard to grasp.

To Talk of Many Things, Of Stories, Ships and String, of Connections, Collaborations, Knowledges and Kin: Prehistoric Seafaring and Embodied Cognition

2018

ion and a fully working memory. None of this does he derive from a 36 consideration of the practices of seafaring. Indeed he goes so far as to deny that anything can be learned from experimental or replica voyaging. In his view demonstrating that it can be done tells you nothing about how it was done. 37 Helen Farr by contrast in performative mode argues seafaring is crucially based in social action and situated knowledge. Her account of what is actually involved in making an experimental sea journey across the Adriatic from Greece to Italy in the Neolithic period rightly shows seafaring is a profoundly social activity based in the collaboration, communication of practical mastery and complex knowledges of seascapes and landscapes with varying spatialities and temporalities. Seafaring is a skill which requires knowledge on a number of different levels. What may be referred to as ‘world’ knowledge involves spatial and temporal awareness and an understanding of land and seascape and a...

Aegean Bronze Age Seascapes – A Case Study in Maritime Movement, Contact and Interaction

Mediterranean Crossroads, 2007

Recent approaches to landscapes, islandscapes, and seascapes have highlighted the multivocal, interactive, multi-sensorial, and, most of all, deeply social nature of human engagement with them. Unfortunately, due to a perceived or real lack of archaeological evidence, anthropological studies, oral histories and the more often than not land-based lifestyle of modern scholars, the maritime world of the Aegean has up to now experienced a certain neglect. It is thus the purpose of this work to draw out the potential of research into seascapes and to promote a new kind of survey that incorporates the maritime environment into its design. The final section reinvestigates common assumptions about mobility, direc- tionality, navigation and interaction in the Bronze Age Aegean and of- fers a perspective more in keeping with ethnographic, archaeological and experimental data. It will be argued that mobility, movement and in- teraction were essential factors of island life, that seafaring technology was well developed, and that, therefore, an isolationist tendency should be considered as socially constructed, rather than an inevitable conse- quence of island living.

The Role of the Physical Environment in Ancient Greek Seafaring

The Classical World, 2003

for their support, advice, and goodwill, which has continued unabated since I embarked on my Ph.D., and without which I would have lost my bearings long ago. Like the navigators who are the focus of this thesis, I have often reassessed my position and my outlook, and have made various changes of direction during my journey over the past five years, and here again I must acknowledge the help of all of those guides whose local knowledge, whether academic or geographic, has helped me to steer my course, and whose hospitality has greeted me at various ports of call: Chris Cassels, Dr. Betsy Gebhard, John and family in Emborio (Chios), Niko Laos and family in Athens and in the Mani, Ian Morrison, Haydar Namli, the Odyssey flotilla, Bill Phelps, Rob Schumacher, Ann Thomas, and all those other friends who have made my time in Edinburgh and in Greece so rewarding. In addition I am grateful to the administrators of the Hector and Elizabeth Catling Bursary, and of the George C. Scott Fund, without whose help my visits to Greece would have been far shorter and far fewer.