When considered in terms of a maritime cultural landscape framework, we observe the fluctuation of the Bronze Age Saronic maritime small world between cohesion and fragmentation, as demographic patterns and external opportunities drew Aigina's attention into and away from the Gulf. The hegemony of Aigina in this small world, at least economically, seems to have begun already in the later Neolithic. From there, the Saronic maritime small world developed steadily to a peak in EH II, collapsed from EH III to MH III, revived in the Shaft Grave Era to reach a second peak in LH I—II, until finally (though gradually) Mycenae usurped Kolonna's traditional role. For the coastal communities dotting the coasts and islands of the Saronic Gulf, this transformation entailed not only a new master, but new cultural material and practices, and a reorientation of maritime relations and connections. In effecting this transformation, Mycenae broke apart the old Saronic world and incorporated the region into a larger world of land and sea connections.
I hope to have made a few central points in this extended case study by interweaving the stories of Kolonna and Kalamianos, ones that can be applied usefully to other cases. The Saronic was susceptible to the emergence of maritime small worlds because visual contact, relative ease of movement by sea, and moderate distances facilitated connectivity and the experiential sense of a coherent world. Taking a bottom-up perspective, we can propose that this is important because most Mycenaeans lived and died mostly or wholly within these small-scale settings. For more than a millennium, Kolonna, with a fortunate location and important natural resources, established itself as a center interacting with small peripheral settlements in the Saronic as well as more distant trading partners. But precisely because small worlds are nested in larger-scale spheres of influence and respond to the consequences of external developments, they are prone to change over time. The Middle Helladic hiatus shows that, as Horden and Purcell emphasized, social forces often trump environmental imperatives; we cannot simply map maritime relations according to currents, winds, and distances.
By following Kolonna and Kalamianos, we see the Saronic small world responding both to internal dynamics and to shifting centers of power and demographic trends played out beyond the Saronic. Kalamianos became prominent only in periods of strong supra-local connectivity: EH II with its nucleation of population and strong maritime orientation, and LH III with the incorporation of large territories by the Mycenaean palaces. In each case, the harbor at Kalamianos and its hinterland were developed to articulate with economic and political systems of greater scope than the Saronic. If we break down these broad patterns, we could write a different history for each coastscape, reflecting varied effects of, and responses to, dynamics both internal and external to the Saronic. The story of Kalamianos is different from those of Megali Magoula, Kiapha Thiti, or the Salaminian settlements at Kanakia and Sklavos, nuancing but not diminishing the validity of the broad diachronic and spatial patterns. The same dynamism pertains to the shape and extent of the regional/intracultural sphere over time. The changing distribution of Aiginetan pottery (excepting rare distant outliers) is a useful measure of Kolonna's regional sphere of interaction in a given phase (Fig. 7.7).
Tracking the long-term history of the Saronic leads to the realization that Kolonna and Mycenae exercised very different styles of center-periphery leadership. The evidence from Kalamianos and other sites suggests that when the Mycenaeans infiltrated the western shores of the Saronic, they colonized, built massively, developed local economies, and in some cases extended a measure of political control. By comparison, the Saronic small world of the Aiginetans seems decidedly underdeveloped. Certainly, Kolonna exercised economic hegemony, benefiting from control over trade in the Saronic and extending its export networks to the nearby mainland and islands. Yet one looks in vain for sites with monumental Aiginetan-style architecture, or other signs of intensive political or economic development of the Saronic. As such, the coastscapes of the Saronic were not exactly like the peraia of later times (Constantakopoulou 2007; Hor-den and Purcell 2000: 133), because the elements of political control and direct economic exploitation from the island state that seem to have been essential in the Classical period were lacking.
In attempting to understand the coastscape at Kalamianos and its role in the Saronic small world, the ability to reconstruct the Bronze Age coastline was decisive, and this will be true also in the two brief case studies to which I now turn.
Potential Coastscapes and Small Worlds:
Miletos and Dimini
In this concluding section, I offer brief outlines of two additional places where there is high potential for identification of coastscapes and small worlds. These
7.28 Map of the southeastern Aegean and southwestern Anatolian coast. Drawing by Felice Ford.
Observations on Miletos and the Latmian Gulf, and Dimini and the Bay of Volos, are not detailed analyses, but rather explorations of ways that a maritime cultural landscape perspective might be illuminating in understanding the Mycenaean-period activity in these coastal settings. The main principle guiding the selection was that reasonable amounts of both archaeological and paleocoastal information should exist.
World History
