Mediterranean pond life

Antiquity, June, 2006 by Mark Pluciennik

W.V. HARRIS (ed.). Rethinking the Mediterranean. xx 414 pages, 19 illustrations, 1 table. 2005. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 0-19-926545-3 hardback 65 [pounds sterling].

EMMA BLAKE & A. BERNARD KNAPP (ed.). The Archaeology of Mediterranean Prehistory. xvi 333 pages, 28 figures, 3 tables. 2005. Malden (MA) & Oxford: Blackwell; 0-631-23267-2 hardback 60 [pounds sterling], 0-631-23268-0 paperback 19.99 [pounds sterling].

JOHN F. CHERRY, DESPINA MARGOMENOU & LAUREN E. TALALAY (ed.). Prehistorians Round the Pond: Reflections on Aegean Prehistory as a Discipline. xiv 179 pages, 30 figures, 11 tables. 2005. Ann Arbor (MI): Kelsey Museum of Archaeology; 0-9741873-13 paperback $19.95.

The philosopher of history Fred Ankersmit once imagined the construction of the various 'narrative substances' dealing with identical past events or processes as something like viewing a landscape or a three-dimensional image: even if often using the very same words, phrases or facts, the view--the situatednessof the constructor/observer--would always and necessarily be slightly different for each participant.

To extend the simile, one might suppose that those travelling together and in roughly the same direction are going to see more or less the same things; that we might usefully contrast the panoramic with the close-up; and that for travellers in one group it might be particularly instructive to attend to those who have arrived from, or are travelling to, different places. The three very different books discussed here are all centred around the Mediterranean or parts of it (the west and south are notably under-represented): Rethinking the Mediterranean (henceforth RM) explicitly discusses what it might be that circumscribes or unites 'Mediterranean' histories, as well as offering short but substantive studies; The Archaeology of Mediterranean Prehistory (AMP) seeks to act as an introductory but partial guidebook; Prehistorians Round the Pond (PRP) is neatly described by its subtitle, Reflections on Aegean Prehistory as a Discipline, and tries to take historical and socio-political stock of part of the route so far. RM is the result of a 2001 conference; PRP a 2003 workshop; and AMP is part of a series with commissioned (and sometimes de-commissioned) papers. There is a fourth book, though, which is a reference point for much of what appears in RM and AMP: Horden and Purcell's The Corrupting Sea (2000; henceforth CS; reviewed in 2001 by Graeme Barker in Antiquity 75: 216-8), and that is itself in part a response to Braudel's work on the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II.

The appearance of these and many other publications, often involving critical reappraisals, is no doubt a sign of the times, whether of growing interest (AMP), together with shifting disciplinary alliances (RM) contributing perhaps towards a sub-disciplinary crisis of confidence (PRP). Susan Alcock's analysis of historical Mediterranean journals (in RM) suggests the former, with a marked rise in titles from the mid-1970s and a veritable explosion from the late 1980s and into this millennium (p. 315); as a subset, in their survey of the contribution of Aegeanists, Cherry & Talalay (PRP) conclude with a sigh of relief that Aegean prehistory is holding its own (with respect to those ever-present Classicists) in maintaining a 'robust academic presence ... reports of its decline are premature' (p. 23). It seems unlikely for a variety of geo-political, historical and institutional reasons that 'the Mediterranean' is going to go away as a topic of disciplinary discourse, let alone as a focus for often externally-funded and arguably quasi-colonial fieldwork, even though there are strong arguments to suggest that it (and even more 'the Aegean') in some ways should. I return to these more general issues later.

The conference in New York from which RM derives was not set up in direct response to CS, but given the timing of the volume's publication, its length (nearly 800 pages--and a second volume promised), its range (from c. 3000 BC to AD 1000), breadth and scholarship, it was inevitable that many of the contributions would directly or indirectly deal with it. The central arguments are reminiscent of the European Union cultural slogan 'Unity in Diversity': that the 'Mediterranean region' may be characterised as an aggregate of ecological microregions, themselves internally variable, and each subject to the vagaries of especially climatic unpredictability and therefore risk; and that this in turn has promoted what the authors call 'connectivity'--webs of relationships, whose salience and direction can be influenced by factors from the environmental to the political. They draw a distinction between histories of the Mediterranean (basically the physico-environmental parameters and configurations), and histories in the Mediterranean. CS has since attracted many tens of thousands of words of review and criticism. Of the 15 chapters in RM, seven deal directly with these or related issues. Harris's own wide-ranging contribution is an extended and often detailed critique of the premises of CS, in which he argues that histories set within the Mediterranean do not--should not--rely on spurious unities of the Mediterranean. A proper comparative history of the ancient world should rather accept and be instructed by 'structural similarities from anywhere whatsoever' (p. 40-1).