The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean

The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean explores contemporary archaeology of the Mediterranean region during the Bronze and Iron Ages.

A. Bernard Knapp (Edited by), Peter van Dommelen (Edited by)

9780521766883, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 January 2015

700 pages, 223 b/w illus. 57 maps 11 tables
28.7 x 22.6 x 3.5 cm, 2.17 kg

'Widely ranging knowledgeable syntheses of Mediterranean later prehistory that are also theoretically informed are rare; those seeking not to shelter in a regional ghetto but engaging with wider archaeology and history rarer still. This welcome volume is all of the above, and thus both important and special.' Sturt W. Manning, Goldwin Smith Chair of Classical Archaeology and Director of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, Cornell University

The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean offers new insights into the material and social practices of many different Mediterranean peoples during the Bronze and Iron Ages, presenting in particular those features that both connect and distinguish them. Contributors discuss in depth a range of topics that motivate and structure Mediterranean archaeology today, including insularity and connectivity; mobility, migration, and colonization; hybridization and cultural encounters; materiality, memory, and identity; community and household; life and death; and ritual and ideology. The volume's broad coverage of different approaches and contemporary archaeological practices will help practitioners of Mediterranean archaeology to move the subject forward in new and dynamic ways. Together, the essays in this volume shed new light on the people, ideas, and materials that make up the world of Mediterranean archaeology today, beyond the borders that separate Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

1. A little history of Mediterranean island prehistory
2. Inside out? Materiality and connectivity in the Aegean archipelago
3. Early island exploitations: productive and subsistence strategies on the prehistoric Balearic Islands
4. Islands and mobility: exploring Bronze Age connectivity in the South-Central Mediterranean
5. Sicily in Mediterranean history in the second millennium BC
6. Late Bronze Age Sardinia: acephalous cohesion
7. Corridors and colonies: comparing fourth-third millennia BC interactions in Southeast Anatolia and the Levant
8. The Anatolian context of philia material culture in Cyprus
9. Bronze Age European elites: from the Aegean to the Adriatic, and back again
10. Greece in the Early Iron Age: mobility, commodities, polities, and literacy
11. Before 'the gates of Tartessos': indigenous knowledge and exchange networks in the Late Bronze Age far west
12. Colonizations and cultural developments in the central Mediterranean
13. The Iron Age in South Italy: settlement, mobility, and culture contact
14. Migration, hybridization, and resistance: identity dynamics in the Early Iron Age Southern Levant
15. Cultural interactions in Iron Age Sardinia
16. Myth into art: foreign impulses and local responses in archaic Cypriot sanctuaries
17. Mobility, interaction, and power in the Iron Age Western Mediterranean
18. Sensuous memory, materiality, and history: rethinking the 'rise of the palaces' on Bronze Age Crete
19. Beyond iconography: meaning-making in Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean visual and material culture
20. Changes in perceptions of the 'other' and expressions of Egyptian self-identity in the Late Bronze Age
21. The lure of the artifact? The effects of acquiring Eastern Mediterranean material culture
22. Stone worlds: technologies of rock-carving and place-making in Anatolian landscapes
23. Rethinking the late Cypriot built environment: households and communities as places of social transformation
24. Households, hierarchies, territories, and landscapes in Bronze Age and Iron Age Greece
25. Connectivity beyond the urban community in central Italy
26. Long term social change in Iron Age northern Iberia (ca.700–200 BC)
27. Who lives there? Settlements, houses, and households in Iberia
28. Landscapes and seascapes of Southwest Iberia in the first millennium BC
29. Domestic and settlement organization in Iron Age Southern France
30. Beyond the general and the particular: rethinking death, memory, and belonging in Early Bronze Age Crete
31. From the nineteenth century to the twenty-first: understanding the Bronze argaric lifecourse in the Mediterranean 'far west'
32. Crossing borders: death and life in second millennium BC southern Iberia and North Africa
33. An entangled past: island interactions, mortuary practices, and the negotiation of identities on Early Iron Age Cyprus
34. The violence of symbols: ideologies, identity, and cultural interaction in central Italian cemeteries
35. The Early Bronze Age Southern Levant: the ideology of an aniconic reformation
36. Ritual as the setting for contentious interaction: from social negotiation to institutionalized authority in Bronze Age Cyprus
37. Cult activities among central and north Italian protohistoric communities
38. Ritual and ideology in Early Iron Age Crete: the role of the past and the east.

Subject Areas: Classical Greek & Roman archaeology [HDDK], Prehistoric archaeology [HDDA], Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA]