Reconstructing a maritime past /
Reconstructing a Maritime Past argues that rather than applying geoethnic labels to shipwrecks to describe 'Greek' or 'Roman' seafaring, a more intriguing alternative emphasizes a maritime culture's valorization of the Mediterranean Sea. Doing so creates new questions and re...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
London ; New York :
Routledge,
[2023].
|
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | Reconstructing a Maritime Past argues that rather than applying geoethnic labels to shipwrecks to describe 'Greek' or 'Roman' seafaring, a more intriguing alternative emphasizes a maritime culture's valorization of the Mediterranean Sea. Doing so creates new questions and research agendas to understand the past human relationship with the sea. This study makes this argument in three sections. Chapters 1 and 2, presenting intellectual histories of maritime archaeological interpretive approaches common in Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, propose that the former perspective, which embodies contemporary and fluid perceptions of culture, is a better theoretical framework for future research. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 reinterpret the corpus of submerged sites in the Mediterranean Sea with this approach, arguing that this dataset does not represent 'Phoenician', 'Muslim' or 'Byzantine' seafaring, for example, but the practices of a maritime culture. Key to this section is the author's method that utilizes superimposed polygons to model patterns of maritime activity, generating centennial results at different scales. Having built the models of a maritime culture's valorization of the Mediterranean Sea, chapter 6 contains the first comparisons of these models to other datasets, questioning the relevance of textual media to understand maritime activity, while finding closer analogues with other archaeological corpora. By deconstructing interpretive methods in maritime archaeology, offering a new synthesizing interpretive approach that is scalable and decoupled from past perceptions, and critically examining the applicability of various media to illuminate the past maritime experience, this book will appeal to scholars at various stages of their careers. |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | xvii, 232 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780367635299 0367635291 9780367635336 036763533X |