One of the benefits of gathering information from historical, recent, and living societies is that, like a well-preserved shipwreck, they offer categories of data that are nearly impossible to recover in a prehistoric archaeological context, and they provide insight on how materials are created, used, and discarded in living societies. And like shipwrecks, they can alert the archaeologist to new ways of thinking. The dangers of simplistic application of ethnographic analogy are well known; the past is indeed a “foreign country" and the gulf that divides the Bronze Age from today must be kept clearly in focus. Yet ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological studies may provide plausible comparative data and even models for Mycenaean coastal worlds. There are numerous ethnographic studies of maritime societies and maritime cultural landscapes around the world, a good many in Oceania, where ancient traditions of seafaring persisted on isolated islands until recently. Several categories of information might be queried for useful comparisons and contrasts; among these are shipbuilding and navigational technology, the organization of maritime coastal communities, and the transmission of maritime knowledge from one generation to the next. In some of these areas, the practices of South Pacific seafarers are exceptionally enlightening, for example the preservation and transmission of maritime knowledge, and the status of the maritime community within the larger society. I incorporate discussion of these points as they relate to Mycenaean seafaring in several chapters.
It may be possible to get this kind of information closer to home. As part of the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (SHARP), which I co-direct with Daniel J. Pullen (Tartaron et al. 2011), our colleague Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory collected a number of oral histories in interviews with older residents of Korphos, until recently a traditional fishing village. A major focus of these interviews has been to record as much information as possible about life in a maritime coastal community prior to the adoption of motorized boats and before the advent of the modern economy; that is, before the Second World War. The results are, in my opinion, scintillating, because they bring to life aspects of the maritime orientation and economic organization of the community, as well as patterns of interaction by sea that are not merely economic but also social, in the same Saronic setting where the Mycenaeans prospered in the thirteenth century BC. Information from the oral histories is assessed in the Saronic Gulf case study in Chapter 7.
A Note about Theory
This book is not conceived as a heavily theoretical work, but an essential component of my approach is a theoretical framework that explicitly identifies a structure for maritime interaction at all spatial and temporal scales, and offers a model for the way that these systems are expected to work that is empirically testable. I provide this in Chapter 6, where I begin by focusing on the uniqueness of the coastal zone as a useful empirical category. Then, in order to construct a dynamic framework for interaction in Aegean coastal zones, I adopt the maritime cultural landscape (Westerdahl 1992) as an overarching concept, and proceed to define four distinct but nested maritime interaction spheres that comprise it, based primarily on geographical scale but also incorporating cultural dimensions. From smallest to largest, these are the coastscape, the small world, the regional/intracultural maritime interaction sphere, and the interregional/intercultural maritime interaction sphere. I draw on social network theory to explain the mechanisms by which these relationships are established and change over time. These concepts are applied to the case studies explored in Chapter 7. More generally, my hope is that this theoretical framework is sufficiently useful and flexible to be adopted in modified form in a range of times and places.
World History
