Tartaron - Maritime Networks in the Mycenaean World

In this book, Thomas F. Tartaron presents a new and original reassessment of the maritime world of the Mycenaean Greeks of the Late Bronze Age. By all accounts a seafaring people, they enjoyed maritime connections with peoples as distant as Egypt and Sicily. These long-distance relationships have been celebrated and much studied; by contrast, the vibrant worlds of local maritime interaction and exploitation of the sea have been virtually ignored. Tartaron argues that local maritime networks, in the form of coastscapes and small worlds, are far more representative of the true fabric of Mycenaean life. He offers a complete template of conceptual and methodological tools for recovering small worlds and the communities that inhabited them. Combining archaeological, geoarchaeological, and anthropological approaches with ancient texts and network theory, he demonstrates the application of this scheme in several case studies. This book presents new perspectives and challenges for all archaeologists with interests in maritime connectivity.

Thomas F. Tartaron is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Chair of the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Graduate Group and a Consulting Scholar in the Mediterranean Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. He has been a Colburn Fellow and Fulbright Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He has participated in numerous excavations and regional surveys in Greece, Iraq, Albania, and the United States. His current field project, the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project, co-directed with Daniel J. Pullen, has exposed a unique Mycenaean harbor settlement that may have been one of Mycenae's main ports on the Aegean Sea. This work is supported by the National Science Foundation (USA) and a number of private foundations. Tartaron has published many articles on Greek prehistory and archaeological method and theory in edited volumes and in journals such as Antiquity, Hesperia , and the Journal of Archaeological Research . His previous book, Bronze Age Landscape and Society in Southern Epirus, Greece (2004), was published in the British Archaeological Reports International Series.

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This book is inspired by a keen interest in coastal archaeology, cultivated during twenty years of fieldwork in coastal regions of mainland Greece. Over this time, I have collected empirical data from three regional landscape archaeology projects with extensive coastal components: the Nikopolis Project (199195), the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (19982002), and the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (200711), which have allowed me to address Mycenaean coastal exploitation at multiple spatial and temporal scales. As I worked through these data and tried to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of coastal life, I became increasingly aware of, and frustrated by, the gaps in our knowledge about coastal exploitation in the Mycenaean period and the selective treatment it has received in the scholarly literature. It seemed that local-scale maritime networks were only rarely discussed, and that the coastal communities that participated in them were largely ignored. The topic deserves more comprehensive, systematic treatment than it has received to date. This book constitutes my attempt to suggest a refocused and more holistic research agenda. The elements of this approach are both conceptual and methodological, but perhaps most importantly, they must be transferable to practice in the field, where only by generating robust empirical data can we begin to close this knowledge gap. Accordingly, I offer one detailed case study and two sketches to demonstrate the application of this approach and to suggest some directions for future research. I hope to make a helpful contribution to Aegean Bronze Age archaeology, but I also intend this work to be sufficiently general that archaeologists working on maritime and coastal problems in any world area might find it useful in their own investigations.