A fundamental assertion, which forms the basis for the archaeological reconstructions to follow, is that in the Bronze Age Aegean there were two distinct realms of maritime activity, entailing different levels of knowledge and experience. A basic, or generalized, realm of activity comprised short-distance travel not requiring advanced way-finding or environmental and social knowledge about distant locations and peoples. A broad range of fishermen, farmers, traders, and other coastal dwellers possessed the resources and skills to undertake simple trips to local fishing grounds, along adjacent coastlines, across straits and gulfs, and out to nearby islands. The risks of this kind of sea travel were comparatively minimal, and consequently harbors large and small must have been busy with small-boat, short-range activity.
A specific, advanced level of knowledge was essential for medium - and longdistance voyaging; medium distance is here defined as nonlocal, intrabasin (Aegean, Ionian) travel, and long distance as venturing beyond these basins. This was the realm of the master shipwright, the expert navigator and helmsman who commanded detailed information about seas and coastlines, and the crews trained in rowing and sailing. It was a subsociety organized in part to safeguard and transmit a body of nautical knowledge to the succeeding generation. Because such mastery was held by few, it often afforded preferential access to exotic goods, raw materials, and esoteric knowledge, and thus it could be a source of considerable social power.
Both generalized and advanced maritime knowledge persisted over long periods of time, the former largely “under the radar" of mechanisms of centralized control. The more specialized knowledge and performance of the professional mariner was of potentially great interest to centralized political entities that depended on communication by sea. Thus at Pylos, personnel and ships were co-opted by the palace, whether to form state fleets or to work as private contractors in the service of the state. Yet the political centralization characteristic of EH II or the Mycenaean palatial period must be seen as a kind of periodic interlude in the more typically loose political structure of the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. At most times, maritime communities must have operated independently or semi-independently. In the next section, the formation and perpetuation of the maritime knowledge of these specialized communities is examined.
Transmission of Maritime Knowledge and the Habitus of Maritime Life
Because for all intents and purposes LBA Greek society was pre-literate, the essentials of maritime life were communicated by word and by nonverbal demonstration. Several kinds of expertise were involved: shipbuilding and repair; techniques of paddling, rowing, and sailing; knowledge of the indicators of winds, currents, and weather; and detailed familiarity with a host of principal and alternative sea routes. Mastery of this body of knowledge was neither easily obtained nor commonly held in society; it required physical skills, mental powers of memorization as well as adept thinking in difficult situations, and plenty of experience on the sea. It was a specialized life and throughout recorded history, communities of seafarers have existed in various degrees of segregation from the rest of society. These maritime “closed communities" (Muckelroy 1978: 221—25, 240—42), “ship societies" (Adams 2001: 304), or possibly in the Mycenaean case a “galley subculture" (Wedde 2005: 33—36; see Chapter 3) formed alternative social entities that did not simply reproduce at smaller scale the wider societies of which they were a part. Indeed, a maritime community might look little like its host society: it might be exclusively male, and constituted by family or kin groups specialized in maritime pursuits. Although hierarchical relationships were essential aboard ship due to the hazardous conditions of seafaring, status in the maritime community might be achieved — according to experience and skill — rather than ascribed on the basis of social class, wealth, or kinship ties (Adams 2001: 305—306). Master sailors, navigators, and helmsmen would always have high status relative to less skilled and experienced crew members, as a matter of necessity.
Historical records and ethnographic studies provide many examples of multigenerational seafaring social groups with strong incentives to maintain and perpetuate the maritime closed community. The practical problem that so much information had to be learned and experience gained could best be addressed by beginning to inculcate knowledge at a young age, within the context of the family. Maritime knowledge was worth guarding as a potential source of power and independence. In early times, those with access to distant places with their exotic products and esoteric knowledge possessed a special, perhaps even mystical, status as Broodbank (2000: 289—90) suggests for the longboat voyagers of the EBA Cyclades (see also Helms 1988). The independence of maritime communities varied with the strength and interest of the state. In the Linear B tablets An 1, An 610, and An 724 from Pylos, we learn that the palace was able to levy ships and rowers from several villages in the last months of its existence. Similarly, in Viking-era Scandinavia, powerful families ruling proto-towns were able to outfit “levy fleets" with men from surrounding farmsteads and villages (Ronnby 2007: 75; Westerdahl 1992: 10). Yet in the
Mycenaean period, and presumably in many other times and places, much of the coastline of the mainland and islands lay beyond the political reach of any palace state, and even within palatial territories, state control could hardly have been all encompassing, whether by force or accommodation. This does not imply that long-distance trade missions involving the acquisition of raw materials and luxury items from distant ports of trade necessarily lay in the hands of independent maritime communities, but short - and medium-distance social and economic sea travel must normally have carried on with little or no palatial interference. These traditions, and the connections they established, time and again outlived centralized states.
Because maritime knowledge was content heavy and complex, some means were needed to transmit a body of maritime knowledge within and across generations. Ethnographic studies of seafaring in the Pacific are a good point of departure, since they offer detailed reconstructions of maritime knowledge and its transmission in a nonliterate society. From a very young age, boys in these communities learn the basic skills of seafaring: they accompany family members on short voyages for fishing or visiting, they assist in the construction of canoes, and build toy models of them. In the Caroline Islands, youngsters begin to learn the complex system of stellar navigation through a series of game-like exercises designed to convey the key concepts and to train the mind for memorization and situational thinking. An instructional “star-structure" compass, representing the great circle of the horizon divided into 32 points where the stars are observed to rise and set, is assembled from simple materials such as stones, shells, and reeds (Fig. 4.13). Sitting together in a boathouse in the evening, experienced navigators guide novices through a set of rigorous exercises including the following (Goodenough and Thomas 1987: 5—7):
Island-Looking: In this memorization and orientation exercise, navigators drill pupils on the locations of islands by starting from an island and, moving around the compass, naming the places that lie in each direction. The exercise is then repeated starting from another island. Advanced students are able to name the locations of reefs, shoals, and other seamarks.
Sea-Knowing: In this exercise, students learn the sea lanes that lie between the islands and reefs by giving them names that refer to the rising and setting of specific stars that occur along them.
Sea Brothers: The student learns all the named sea lanes that lie along the same star compass coordinates. If a navigator forgets the star path between two islands, he may remember that the path is “brother" to another sea lane, and thus recover the forgotten coordinates.
Coral Hole Stirring: To reinforce the mastery of the star courses, this game imagines a chase sequence between a fisherman and a parrot fish. As the fisherman probes a hole in the reef at a given island, the fish darts off to a neighboring island, then another, and so on until eventually returning to
4.13 Example of a star-structure compass, Caroline Islands, Micronesia. Thomas 1987: 81. Courtesy of Stephen D. Thomas.
The starting point. Each hole has a name that substitutes for the name of the island.
With these and other exercises, aspiring navigators are initiated, in a systematic way, into the knowledge they will need to voyage successfully at sea. As they sail with master navigators, they recall this information and put the principles into practice. Some, but not all, will become master navigators themselves, responsible for transmitting knowledge to the next generation.
The community of sailors in the Caroline Islands takes on the characteristics of a closed maritime society, with selective membership and an oral tradition that is both durable and conservative. The apprenticeship of navigators and sailors (exercises, training at sea) is rigorous, with constant practice and layers of redundancy that facilitate mastery of crucial knowledge. In this way the society and its fundamental store of knowledge are faithfully reproduced and protected. The cosmology of the navigational star structure, and the alternative names for islands and sea lanes, are part of an esoteric seafaring lore known only within the group. This lore also incorporates stories with practical and moral lessons, which are embedded in chants that are structured, metrically and tonally, to aid in memory recall. The meaning of the chants is often cryptic, and only learned with the interpretive commentary of a teacher. The settings for this instruction are special places (the boathouse, at sea) exclusive to the maritime community. Because sea travel is at once both essential to island life and yet formidable and often perilous, master navigators are also ritual specialists who communicate with spirits of navigation, observe taboos, and perform rituals to ward off dangers at sea.
To place these ethnographic observations in a more general and time-transgressive model, Bourdieu's concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1977, 1990) is a useful way to frame the process by which maritime social groups and their knowledge are perpetuated. This is so because habitus explains how and why traditional lifeways are reproduced and preserved over long periods of time, while at the same time mediating between the extremes of determinism — that is, that human perceptions and practices are determined by pre-existing structures over which people have no control — and voluntarism, which accords humans unfettered freedom to make choices that shape the conditions of their lives.
According to Bourdieu, the habitus is a system of dispositions in an individual or social group toward conceptions, activities, or behaviors that are structured and perpetuated by a “present past" of similarly structured practices and worldviews (Bourdieu 1990: 53—55). In other words, each generation inherits a durable structure that defines the parameters of thought and action in which it can operate, and within which practice is ultimately generated. The habitus is not defined by explicit laws, but instead by the unconscious adherence to these inherited structures. Bourdieu did not view the habitus as a purely determinative mechanism in which individuals and groups are without choices, however. Instead, there exist “ ... an infinite number of practices that are relatively unpredictable"; nevertheless, freedom to choose is not actually unlimited because “. . . the habitus tends to produce all the 'reasonable,' 'common-sense' behaviors (and only those) which are possible within the limits of these regularities" (Bourdieu 1990: 55).
To many observers, Bourdieu's actors possess too little agency, leaving insufficient scope to account for innovation (“creation of novelty": Bourdieu 1990: 55) outside the bounds of inherited knowledge, particularly internally generated change as distinct from that which is externally stimulated or enforced. An alternative viewpoint is expressed in the “structuration theory" of Anthony Giddens (Giddens 1979, 1984; Nakassis 2006: 19—23), which posits a different relationship between structure and agency. Giddens envisions structure and agency as forming an inseparable duality. Although individuals and groups are undeniably shaped by the durable structures they inherit through no choice of their own, actors are knowledgeable, able to make conscious choices that are not only unconstrained by the limits of the habitus but that also may reshape it. Conscious choices need not have intended or predictable outcomes; they often lead down contingent paths to changes that could not have been predicted and for which the chains of agency are known only in hindsight. In this manner the elements of structure — traditions, worldviews, practices — interact with agency in a dynamic process of continuity and change, of mutual shaping (Giddens 1984: 14). A simple example is linguistic change: language is a dynamic structure in which everyday speech reproduces inherited syntax and semantics, but also introduces changes that one day may be additions to, or modifications of, the structure of language (Nakassis 2006: 21).
The habitus, in Bourdieu's sense, aptly describes the power of tradition and the conservative maintenance and transmission of maritime knowledge over long periods of time. This is particularly the case because maritime communities depended on the effective reproduction of large bodies of specialized knowledge to protect their lifeways and in a literal sense their very lives. Their habitus cannot have been overly rigid, however, because adaptation and innovation were equally essential to their survival. To continue the ethnographic example, elements of innovation are evident among the Caroline island navigators. Often, a master navigator died before imparting to his pupils his full commentary on seafaring lore, leaving them to develop their own interpretations based on the knowledge they had managed to acquire as well as their personal experiences. The new versions were frequently “quite different from the original and yet still workably consistent with reality" (Goodenough and Thomas 1987: 13). Further, there is a tendency for navigators to elaborate on the lore in displays of virtuosity. Some individuals voyage to more distant places along star paths to discover islands previously unknown, which they may equate with previously mythical places. It is also the case that Caroline islanders have adapted to the availability of new materials and sailing (including navigational) equipment from the West. Some new knowledge can be accommodated within the existing habitus, for example, by fitting newly discovered places and new commentaries into the dynamic, living lore. Technological change, particularly that initiated by contact with the West, may precipitate deeper structural changes, and the fate of the traditions of the maritime communities of the Pacific — their habitus — is far from clear in the twenty-first century. Yet the recent history of the Caroline Island navigators amply demonstrates a closed maritime community striving, both consciously and unconsciously, to perpetuate and protect their habitus, while also creating and making choices about information that pushes beyond the bounds of their inherited structures.
Maritime Networks in the Mycenaean World Mycenaean Maritime Communities
We ought now to ask whether we can detect maritime communities in the Mycenaean world possessing a specialized body of maritime knowledge. There is little direct evidence for them, though it is possible to make certain inferences from indirect evidence, and from what we know of maritime communities of other times and places. There are certain general statements we can advance, for example that the nautical life involves specialized skills and occupations. Shipbuilding and maintenance, navigation, and even rowing and other crew duties all require experience and advanced skills, which must have been transmitted through a system of master-apprentice relationships. A consistent conclusion drawn from recent trials of replica ships — from “Neolithic" reed boats (Tzalas 1995b), to Bronze Age galleys (Severin 1985, 1987), to the reconstructed trireme Olympias (Rankov 2012) — is that an inexperienced crew requires a long apprenticeship before it can properly propel and control an unfamiliar vessel. The triremes of the Classical Athenian navy were manned by professionalized crews of free citizens, metics, and foreign mercenaries who practiced during peacetime (Hale 2009); a similar program of training may have been followed by the captain, helmsman, and rowers of the Mycenaean galley.5
It may be possible through archaeological means to identify the coastal habitations and workplaces of maritime communities, but this remains a challenge because so few harbors, at least of the Mycenaean period, have been recognized and studied. This topic will occupy much of the remainder of the book. For now, let us explore how the early Greeks represented their maritime pursuits in word and image, through the Linear B tablets, iconographic images, and the later Homeric epics, particularly the Odyssey. In these sources, we might recognize the bare outlines of a maritime duree, of persons in action or a persistent mentalite expressed in words.
World History
