Historical Archaeology in the Mediterranean

The most recent issue of Historical Archaeology featured a nice gaggle of articles on the historical archaeology of the Mediterranean in a special issue edited by Michael Given and Russell Palmer. As readers of this blog know, this is a topic that is of particular interest to me especially in terms of historical archaeology in Greece (and maybe, someday, Cyprus). The line up for this issue is impressive and while I haven’t managed to read all the articles, I did dip my toes in the issue by starting with articles that were close to my field work interests.

The introduction does a nice job framing the complicated geography of Mediterranean archaeology against the equally complicated notion of historical archaeology. In an American context, historical archaeology represents archaeology from the period of colonial contact to the end of the long 19th century (or even until World War II). Traditionally, this coincides with the appearance of written sources which support a rather narrow concept of the notion of “historical.” Of course, the Mediterranean, by such standard, was historical from the Late Bronze Age, but this seems like an unhelpful way to understand this term in its new context. On the other hand, understanding what constitutes historic archaeology in the Mediterranean requires a bit of regional nuance and a recognition that the concept of historical archaeology owes as much to the topics explored in Charles Orser’s famous haunts of “colonialism, eurocentrism, capitalism, and modernity” as the presence of written text. It is a sobering (if useful) realization that periodization centered on archaeology that explores these concepts works as well for Mediterranean as, say, the Atlantic World.

For Greece, the end Byzantine control over the peninsula, the rise (and fall) of Ottoman power, and the emergence of an independent Greek state offer a series of tidy makers for periodization especially if the intent is to foreground the kind of global phenomenon at the core of Orser’s oft-quoted definition of the field. Of course, the plurality of histories around the Mediterranean means that what might be convenient or even (vaguely) appropriate dates for one place is perhaps less useful for somewhere else and that diversity is represented in these articles. 

Michael Given’s article on the mountains of Cyprus (and mountains in general) is a nice example of how the Mediterranean might distend our conventional notions of historical archaeology. He argues that scholars, colonialists, and tourists have long viewed mountains and the people who live in them as static, unchanging, and perhaps even primordial. Braudel famously remarked “The mountains come first” and Harold Koster saw the transhumant route of Greek pastoralists in the Argolid as the “Thousand Year Road.” Given urges us to replace this ahistorical and static mode of thinking about mountains with a more dynamic one. He demonstrates how archaeological attention to mountains has revealed a dynamic landscape shaped by both agricultural practices (and their inevitable connection to markets, state policies, and settlement patterns) and the emotional connections that fortify a sense of place. In some ways, Given’s mountains evokes work on small Mediterranean islands which suggests that despite their rugged isolation, they remains highly susceptible to local and regional pressures which shaped their use. Thus, historical archaeology can reveal the dynamism in places and groups who seemingly existed “without history.”

Stelios Lekakis’s work in some ways does the opposite. It focuses on how the evident dynamism of recent times has made their ruins appear all the more ephemeral and inconsequential. As a result, communities, developers, civic leaders, and state authorities have neglected and destroyed modern remains in the Aegean (which Lekakis uses as a useful transnational category) and their gradual disappearance from view. By drawing attention to the practices and processes that have led to disappearance of the more recent past, he highlights the urgent need for a more engaged and political involved discipline of historical and contemporary archaeology.

Finally, Charles Orser, one of the deans of global historical archaeology, offers some observations on the relationship between Braudel, the Mediterranean, and historical archaeology in this region. He stressed that the conventional attention Mediterranean archaeology have given to ceramics offers an avenue to interrogate Braudel’s image of the interconnected Mediterranean on the local level. In other words, Mediterranean archaeologists have long had the “tool kit” necessary to contribute to a global historical archaeology as well as the kinds of questions that historians more broadly have considered when looking beyond the nation state as the unit of study and analysis.

To be clear, I’ve not processed or even read the rest of the contributions to this volume, but they’re now on the top of growing “to read” pile!