Landmarks

Mountain ranges or peaks with distinctive shapes served as good general markers for staying on course, since they were visible from great distances. For more precise delineation of routes, however, sea cliffs and headlands were particularly useful. In historical times, as recorded by Strabo and others, prominent headlands functioned as nodes in longer journeys conceived in terms of multiple headland-to-headland segments (Morton 2001: 186—88). Thus, one such voyage in the northern Aegean was defined as a series of headlands (Posei-donion, Sepias, Kanastron, Nymphaion, Akrathos) separating the intervening gulfs (Maliac, Thermaic, Toronaean, Singitic, Strymonic; Strabo, Geographica 7.fr. 32). Because of their high visibility and vital role in seafaring, headlands have been favored locations to place various kinds of manmade landmarks meant to be seen from the sea. As early as Homer, conspicuous burial mounds were placed on headlands at the Dardanelles (for Patroclus: Iliad 7.85—91) and at Circe's island (for Elpenor: Odyssey 11.71—78). An archaeological example is the erection of large cairn-like structures, which may have taken the form of tall towers before their collapse over time, on high coastal ridges of the northeastern Peloponnese in EH II (Tartaron, Pullen, and Noller 2006; Tartaron et al.

2011: 626). Such structures could have been fitted out as lighthouses or signal stations, but this is mere speculation. Apart from their potential as conspicuous landmarks, the monumentality of their construction may have warned off those with hostile intent. Whatever the original motivation for constructing mounds, cairns, or in later times, temples on coastal promontories, they served both to advertise and to provide useful navigational markers to passing vessels. In certain periods of particular orientation to the sea, for example EH II and LH III, settlements might be found on coastal promontories, but it was often not practical to settle on them, sometimes for reasons of defense, but more often due to untenable distances to water and arable land. Nevertheless, promontories are primary locations to search for traces of ancient structures related to maritime activity.

Many coastal promontories or sea cliffs were distinctive for their unusual shapes or striking colors. In historical times, these were defining properties of such topographies, giving rise to place names incorporating colors (e. g., leukos for white, melanos for black, erythros for red) or animal shapes (e. g., Kynosoura for dog's tail, Onougnathos for ass's jaw). A crystalline limestone sea cliff, shining brilliant white in the sun, could be a striking and easily recognizable marker along a sea route; the pervasive limestone geology of the Greek mainland explains the widespread occurrence of forms of leukos for coastal landforms. Naming prominent features along a route transformed space to place; once a place is named and described, it becomes part of the known world and thus less terrifying than a vast, unfamiliar sea. Regrettably, for the Bronze Age we have only the place names from the Linear B tablets and a few other likely Aegean toponyms from Egyptian and Hittite sources. Of these, only a few belong demonstrably to coastal locations and none seems to refer to an evocative coastal landform.

Of crucial navigational importance were the coastal features that pointed toward safe haven, supplies, and trading or raiding opportunities. Long beach strands, river mouths, estuaries, and embayments formed a constellation of potential stopping-places en route, but these landmarks had to be supplemented with knowledge of the characteristics of the shallows to be negotiated to reach them. Human settlements were situated in many of these places, visible in the structures of buildings, walls, roads, and cemeteries; the disposition of their inhabitants toward visitors from the sea had also to be taken into account.