PREFACE

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 (1991—95), the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey (1998—2002), and the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project (2007—11), 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.