The purpose of this chapter is to bring together the various conceptual and empirical approaches outlined in previous chapters in order to apply them to real-world times and places of the Aegean Bronze Age. In three case studies, this chapter suggests how we might write diachronic histories of maritime connectivity at local to regional scales of interaction. One lengthy case study is drawn from the “heartland" of the Mycenaean world in the Saronic Gulf, followed by two brief portrayals of potential coastscapes and small worlds, one focused on Miletos on the coast of southwestern Asia Minor, and the other on Dimini and neighboring sites on the Bay of Volos, which are meant to suggest opportunities for further research along the lines advocated in this book.
This exercise aims to reveal the trajectories over time of coastscapes that may range from isolated to highly connected, and of small worlds that oscillate between cohesion and fragmentation, which often means alternating between hierarchical and heterarchical or nonhierarchical organizational structures. It focuses both on internal dynamics and on the ways that external stimuli — opportunities, threats, and greater historical currents — impinge to play often profound roles in local and small-regional histories. Placing a primary emphasis on coastscapes and small worlds means eliciting rich local contexts from which to build out to broader spheres of interaction (Galaty, Parkinson et al. 2009; Tartaron 2010; Wright 2010: 808, 815). These case studies construct histories in the Mediterranean, because only when these are robust can they offer comparative material to the grand project of history of the Mediterranean (Horden and Purcell 2000).
Making and Breaking a Small World: The Saronic Gulf,
3000-1200 BC
The essential aim of this case study is a diachronic reconstruction of a Bronze Age maritime small world in the Saronic Gulf. The inhabitants of Kolonna on the island of Aigina dominated this small world of many coastscapes — coastal settlements dotting the islands and mainland — from the middle of the EBA until the early phases of the LBA, when the expanding palace at Mycenae broke it apart, incorporating Saronic communities into broader Aegean networks. Over its life, this small world alternated between cohesion and fragmentation, as Kolonna responded to conditions within the Gulf and without, often initiated by events taking place beyond the Saronic and affecting large parts of the Aegean. I will attempt to write this history primarily from two vantage points: from the center at Kolonna; and from the small Bronze Age settlement at Kalamianos, built upon a gently inclined shoreline near Korphos on the Saronic's western coast. Kalamianos was a rather minor player for most of the period under consideration, only achieving prominence in EH II and LH IIIB. Other settlements in Kolonna's orbit will be called upon to fill in aspects of the story.
World History
