Mediterranean Islands, Fragile Communities and Persistent Landscapes
Antikythera in Long-Term Perspective

Explores the human ecology and history of Antikythera over the full course of its approximately seven-thousand-year history of human activity.

Andrew Bevan (Author), James Conolly (Author)

9781107033450, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 May 2013

327 pages, 47 b/w illus. 31 colour illus. 6 tables
26 x 18.3 x 2 cm, 0.86 kg

'Antikythera, the first Mediterranean island to undergo site survey in its entirety using modern GIS techniques, reveals the fragility and yet resilience of its landscape and human population. Bevan and Conolly's analysis of change, from pioneer farmers to predatory pirates, ably documents the microcosmic vulnerability of life in a changing sea.' Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge

Mediterranean landscape ecology, island cultures and long-term human history have all emerged as major research agendas over the past half-century, engaging large swathes of the social and natural sciences. This book brings these traditions together in considering Antikythera, a tiny island perched on the edge of the Aegean and Ionian seas, over the full course of its human history. Small islands are particularly interesting because their human, plant and animal populations often experience abrupt demographic changes, including periods of near-complete abandonment and recolonization, and Antikythera proves to be one of the best-documented examples of these shifts over time. Small islands also play eccentric but revealing roles in wider social, economic and political networks, serving as places for refugees, hunters, modern eco-tourists, political exiles, hermits and pirates. Antikythera is a rare case of an island that has been investigated in its entirety from several systematic fieldwork and disciplinary perspectives, not least of which is an intensive archaeological survey. The authors use the resulting evidence to offer a unique vantage on settlement and land use histories.

1. Problems and perspectives
2. Methods and data
3. A Mediterranean and island environment
4. Material worlds
5. Landscape archaeology and historical ecology I
6. Landscape archaeology and historical ecology II
7. Mobility and investment
8. The eccentric, the specialist, and the displaced
9. Antikythera in context.

Subject Areas: Classical Greek & Roman archaeology [HDDK], Prehistoric archaeology [HDDA], Archaeology by period / region [HDD], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA]