As emphasized in the first chapter, the environmental settings of Mycenaean coastal worlds are anything but static; they are constantly undergoing modification by human and natural agents. Some systems are more stable than others. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the weather - and climate-related phenomena that make up the Mediterranean maritime environment — including winds, currents, temperature, and storm patterns — fluctuate on a regular basis but in their broad patterns have not diverged significantly since the Bronze Age. The ability of mariners to cope with environmental challenges through technology and experiential knowledge may have changed radically through the ages, however, so we cannot assume, for example, that Mycenaean captains and navigators possessed the same skill set as Homer's or Hesiod's seafarers.
The changes that have occurred in coastal landscapes and seascapes are generally more extreme, and these are examined in Chapter 5. Coastlines are exceptionally vulnerable to a host of natural alterations resulting from earth processes operating at scales from global to local. Global sea-level change has had a strong effect in some areas. In particular, a maximum marine transgression some 6,000 or 7,000 years ago that flooded Mediterranean land masses and created vast embayments on many Mediterranean coastlines was followed by a stabilization of global (eustatic) sea level and the gradual infilling of these bays with sediments over time. One result is that certain important harbor sites that were open to the sea in the Bronze Age — Troy, Ephesos, and Miletos on Asia Minor's Aegean coast are striking examples — are now stranded literally kilometers inland today. An even more insidious process — because it is more localized and harder to detect on the landscape — is tectonic activity. In the earthquake-prone Aegean region, subsidence and uplift are common coastal processes. There may be regional tendencies — for example, the Corinthia, where the Corinthian Gulf coast is rising while the Saronic Gulf coast is subsiding — but the complexity of the fault systems is such that sites separated by only a few kilometers on the same coastline can have quite distinct tectonic histories (Nixon et al. 2009). Human activities may promote change in coastal embayments, usually by accelerating rates of sedimentation through practices such as extensive agriculture and grazing, which release soil to be eroded and transported to the sea.
Even relatively small changes in a coastline can have transformative effects, rendering a once-inviting harbor unusable by separating it from the sea, making the approach too shallow, altering its protective configuration, or leaving a new set of navigational hazards in the inshore waters. These changes exacerbate the already low visibility of Mycenaean anchorages that can be attributed to the fact that Bronze Age communities did not build permanent harbor facilities such as piers, quays, or breakwaters, so far as we know. Instead, they pulled smaller boats onto the beach, or anchored just offshore, exactly as depicted in the Flotilla Fresco at Akrotiri. Changes in the coastline play a key role in understanding all of the coastscapes examined as case studies in Chapter 7 (Kalamianos, Miletos, and Dimini).
Integrated methods of geomorphological observation, geological coring, and geophysical prospection for paleocoastal reconstruction are well established in the Mediterranean, and the database of case studies of the coasts of Greece and Turkey is constantly growing. The basic principles and many examples of this work are examined in Chapter 5, and the prospects for integrating such programs with archaeological investigations of local and regional maritime worlds are assessed. These studies are essential, but they are expensive and time consuming; they often require many seasons of fieldwork and the results of various analyses may appear only gradually over a period of years. Particular care must be taken that the archaeologist and earth scientist share compatible understandings of the problems being addressed and the expectations of results.
World History
