Materiality and Social Practice investigates the transformative potential arising from the interplay between material forms, social practices and intercultural relations. Such a focus necessitates an ...approach that takes a transcultural perspective as a fundamental methodology and, then a broader understanding of the inter-relationship between humans and objects. Adopting a transcultural approach forces us to change archaeology's approach towards items coming from the outside. By using them mostly for reconstructing systems of exchange or for chronology, archaeology has for a long time reduced them to their properties as objects and as being foreign. This volume explores the notion that the significance of such items does not derive from the transfer from one place to another as such but, rather, from the ways in which they were used and contextualised. The main question is how, through their integration into discourses and practices, new frameworks of meaning were created conforming neither with what had existed in the receiving society nor in the area of origin of the objects.
Varied approaches to an overlooked time period in the history and archaeology of the Mediterranean
 
This book presents multidisciplinary perspectives on Greece, ...Corsica, Malta, and Sicily from the fourth to the thirteenth centuries, an often-overlooked time in the history of the central Mediterranean. The research approaches and areas of specialization collected here range from material culture to landscape settlement patterns, from epigraphy to architecture and architectural decoration, and from funerary archaeology to urban fabric and cityscapes.
 
Topics covered in these chapters include late Roman villas; the formation of Byzantine and Islamic settlements in western Sicily; reuse of protohistoric sites in late antiquity and the middle ages in eastern Sicily; early Christian landscapes and settlements in Corsica; the transition from late antiquity through Byzantine rule to Muslim conquest in Malta; trade network trajectories of the Aegean islands and Crete; and crosscultural interactions in medieval Greece. Together, these essays show the potential of post-Ancient and post-Classical archaeology, highlighting missing links between the Roman world and medieval Byzantium and broadening the horizons of new generations of archaeologists.
Contributors: Carla Aleo Nero | Effie F. Athanassopoulos | Giuseppe Bazan | Amelia R. Brown | Gabriele Castiglia | Angelo Castrorao Barba | David Cardona | Santino Alessandro Cugno | Michael J. Decker | Franco Dell’Aquila | Scott Gallimore | Matt King | Rosa Lanteri | Pasquale Marino | Roberto Miccichè | Philippe Pergola | Filippo Pisciotta | Natalia Poulou | Grant Schrama | Claudia Speciale | Davide Tanasi
The Mediterranean coastal regions of Southern Europe have long been world leaders in mass tourism. This book examines some key questions for tourism development in these areas, with implications for ...similar regions across the world. The standardised forms of mass tourism are diversifying – with more specialised forms, notably those based on nature, culture and heritage, and those catering for special interests. There is a growing spectrum of modes of tourism, with an emphasis on variety, flexibility and permeability. Both mass tourism and the more diversified forms substantially impact on sustainable development. Policies promoting sustainable development are often of two main types: developing smaller-scale, alternative tourism products that are intended to be less damaging to the environment and society, and secondly, attempts to make mass tourism coastal resorts more sustainable. But there has been little critical assessment of these policies, either evaluating their basic assumptions or their successes and failures in practice. This edited book critically examines these issues for varied coastal regions in Southern Europe, including case studies from Spain, Croatia, Turkey, and north and south Cyprus.
This book examines historical evidence from the last 2000 years to analyse earthquakes in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Early chapters review techniques of historical seismology, while ...the main body of the book comprises a catalogue of more than 4000 earthquakes identified from historical sources. Each event is supported by textual evidence extracted from primary sources and translated into English. Covering southern Rumania, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, the book documents past seismic events, places them in a broad tectonic framework, and provides essential information for those attempting to prepare for, and mitigate the effects of, future earthquakes and tsunamis in these countries. This volume is an indispensable reference for researchers studying the seismic history of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, including archaeologists, historians, earth scientists, engineers and earthquake hazard analysts. A parametric catalogue of these seismic events can be downloaded from www.cambridge.org/9780521872928.
Over the past decade, evidence has been mounting that our ancestors developed skills to sail across large bodies of water early in prehistory. In this fascinating volume, Alan Simmons summarizes and ...synthesizes the evidence for prehistoric seafaring and island habitation worldwide, then focuses on the Mediterranean. Recent work in Melos, Crete, and elsewhere-- as well as Simmons' own work in Cyprus-- demonstrate that long-distance sailing is a common Paleolithic phenomenon. His comprehensive presentation of the key evidence and findings will be of interest to both those interested in prehistory and those interested in ancient seafaring.
The 'Arab Spring' triggered paradigmatic shifts but, despite these changes, much in the Euro-Mediterranean region remains the same. Utilising 'Logics of Action', an innovative theoretical framework ...designed to capture the complexity of political interaction in one of the fastest changing regions in the world, this book discusses developments in the region before and after the Arab Spring that can be characterised by a continuation of the norm. Expert contributors identify patterns of interaction between governmental institutions, economic entrepreneurs, religious groups and other diverse actors that withstood these historical changes and explore why these relationships have proved so robust. Connecting a unique sample of case studies on changing and persistent 'Logics of Action' within the Euro-Mediterranean space this book provides a pivotal contribution to our understanding of political interaction between North Africa, the Middle East and the European Union. Offering a completely new perspective on the events of the 'Arab Spring' it identifies something that seems paradoxical at first sight; persistence in times of radical change.
With the creation of the Mediterranean partnership and the recent move towards the creation of the Union for the Mediterranean in 2008, a new emphasis is placed on the Mediterranean in the study of ...European Integration.
This book brings together a collection of experts to address this important new area of study and discuss issues such as development, aid, labour, markets, human capital investment, Europeanization and institutional reform.
Conventional scholarship on the Mediterranean portrays the Inner Sea as a timeless entity with unchanging ecological and agrarian features. But, Faruk Tabak argues, some of the traditional and olden ...characteristics that we attribute to it today are actually products of relatively recent developments. Locating the shifting fortunes of Mediterranean city-states and empires in patterns of long-term economic and ecological change, this study shows how the quintessential properties of the basin—the trinity of cereals, tree crops, and small livestock—were reestablished as the Mediterranean's importance in global commerce, agriculture, and politics waned.
Tabak narrates this history not from the vantage point of colossal empires, but from that of the mercantile republics that played a pivotal role as empire-building city-states. His unique juxtaposition of analyses of world economic developments that flowed from the decline of these city-states and the ecological change associated with the Little Ice Age depicts large-scale, long-term social change. Integrating the story of the western and eastern Mediterranean—from Genoa and the Habsburg empire to Venice and the Ottoman and Byzantine empires—Tabak unveils the complex process of devolution and regeneration that brought about the eclipse of the Mediterranean.
This collection of essays studies the movement of texts in the Mediterranean basin in the medieval period from historical and philological perspectives. Rejecting the presumption that texts simply ...travel without changing, the contributors examine closely the nature of these writings, which are concerned with such topics as science and medicine, and how they changed over the course of their journeys.
Transit and transformation give texts new subtexts and contexts, providing windows through which to study how memory, encryption, oral communication, cultural and religious values, and knowledge traveled and were shared, transformed, and preserved. This volume broadens how we think about texts, communication, and knowledge in the medieval world.
Aside from the editors, the contributors are Mushegh Asatryan, Brian N. Becker, Leonardo Capezzone, Leigh Chipman, Ofer Elior, Zohar Hadromi-Allouche, B. Harun Küçük, Israel M. Sandman, and Tamás Visi.
This volume presents a collection of studies focussing on population and settlement patterns in the Roman empire in the perspective of the economic development of the Mediterranean world between 100 ...BC and AD 350. The analyses offered here highlight the issues of regional and temporal variation in Italy, Spain, Britain, Egypt, Crete, and Asia Minor from classical Greece to the early Byzantine period. The chapters fall into two main groups, the first dealing with the evidence for rural settlement, as revealed by archaeological field surveys, and the attendant methodological problems of extrapolating from that evidence a view of population; and the second with city populations and the phenomenon of urbanization. They proceed to consider hierarchies of settlement in the characteristic classical pattern of city plus territory, and the way in which those entities are defined from the highest to the lowest level: the empire as 'city of Rome plus territory', then regional and local hierarchies, and, more precisely, the identity and the nature of the 'instruments' which enables them to function in economic cohesion. Contributors to this volume - A. Bowman, A. Wilson, S. Price, R. Witcher, D. Mattingly, P. Attema and T. de Haas, N. Morley, A. Marzano, J. Hanson, S. Keay & G. Earl.
