Maritime Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean World

Justin Leidwanger · Carl Knappett

Nov 2018 · Cambridge University Press

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This volume brings together scholars of Mediterranean archaeology, ancient history, and complexity science to advance theoretical approaches and analytical tools for studying maritime connectivity. For the coast-hugging populations of the ancient Mediterranean, mobility and exchange depended on a distinct environment and technological parameters that created diverse challenges and opportunities, making the modeling of maritime interaction a paramount concern for understanding cultural interaction more generally. Network-inspired metaphors have long been employed in discussions of this interaction, but increasing theoretical sophistication and advances in formal network analysis now offer opportunities to refine and test the dominant paradigm of connectivity. Extending from prehistory into the Byzantine period, the case studies here reveal the potential of such network approaches. Collectively they explore the social, economic, religious, and political structures that guided Mediterranean interaction across maritime space.

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Justin Leidwanger is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics, a faculty member at the Stanford Archaeology Center, and the Omar and Althea Dwyer Hoskins Faculty Scholar at Stanford University, California. His research uses maritime cultural heritage to understand the role of seaborne networks in structuring economic and social relationships across the Roman and late antique worlds.

Carl Knappett is Professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Toronto, where he holds the Walter Graham/ Homer Thompson Chair in Aegean Prehistory. He is the author of Thinking Through Material Culture (2005), and An Archaeology of Interaction (2014), and recently co-editor of Minoan Architecture and Urbanism (2017) with Quentin Letesson, and Human Mobility and Technological Transfer in the Prehistoric Mediterranean (Cambridge, 2017) with Evangelia Kiriatzi.