Island Archaeology and the Origins of Seafaring in the Eastern Mediterranean: proceedings of the Wenner Gren workshop held at Reggio Calabria

bs_bs_banner bs_bs_banner The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology (2016) 45.1: 206–235 doi: 10.1111/.12155 Reviews Island Archaeology and the Origins of Seafaring in the Eastern Mediterranean: proceedings of the Wenner Gren workshop held at Reggio Calabria, October 19–21, 2012 Eurasian Prehistory vols 10 and 11 ALBERT J. AMMERMAN and THOMAS DAVIES (Eds) with 30 Contributors Vol. 1: 185 pp., Vol. 2: 235 pp., numerous illustrations some in colour Peabody Museum Publications via Oxbow Books, 10 Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford OX1 2EW, 2013 and 2014, £16 each (sbk), ISBN 978-8393421855 and ISBN 978-8393421893 Two volumes of the journal Eurasian Prehistory have been devoted to publishing the proceedings of a Wenner-Gren Workshop held at Reggio Calabria, 19–21 October 2012, on the subject of ‘Island Archaeology and the origins of Seafaring in the Eastern Mediterranean’. The workshop was the brainchild of Albert Ammerman and it is he who has brought together this remarkable publication. The core of the work is made up of 17 specialist papers grouped into two parts, ‘Placing island archaeology and early voyaging in context’ and ‘Case Studies’, the latter being divided into sections covering Cyprus, the Aegean, and the Central and Western Mediterranean. This is rich material indeed—a series of specialist studies dealing with chronologies, individual sites, material culture, faunal studies and folk movements within the temporal bracket from the middle Palaeolithic to the early Neolithic. Together these papers present the raw material and the interpretive frameworks needed to address the central theme of the workshop. It is a daunting array of high-quality scholarship presented by those at the cutting edge of research, and to bind it all together it is bookended by two papers by Ammerman. His ‘Introduction’, which sets out in detail the broad intellectual context for the workshop, and a tail piece ‘Setting our sights on the distant horizon’, which offers a masterly summary of what has been learnt and lays out the questions still needing to be addressed. These two papers are a significant academic contribution in their own right—a state-of-the-art overview and a research design for the future. In short the publication is a model of its kind; closely focused, packed with new data, and deeply challenging. So, what is it all about? Quite simply, we know that about 50,000 years ago early modern humans made the sea crossing from the Indonesian islands to Australia. It was a remarkable feat of daring and an even more remarkable achievement. What then can be said of the origins of seafaring in the Mediterranean, where for so long there has been the implied assumption that seafaring was one of the arts that was developed much later by complex societies? That this was a false assumption was shown some years ago when, in excavating stratified deposits in Franchthi Cave, overlooking the bay of Argos on the Greek mainland, archaeologists found tools made of obsidian, a black volcanic glass brought from the island of Melos, 120 km away, in layers dating to 11,000 BC. Clearly towards the end of the Upper Palaeolithic period people were making overseas journeys. It was this discovery that prompted archaeologists to begin to rethink the origins of seafaring in the Eastern Mediterranean inspiring the research presented in this work. The Mediterranean is a good place to address the question of early seafaring because of the controls offered by its array of islands. In his ‘Introduction’ Ammerman lays out the basis of the proper procedure to be adopted. The first step is to know when an island became an island given that significant changes in sea-level have been recorded in the Mediterranean. With sea-levels falling to c.120–130 m below its present levels some 20,000 years ago, many of what are now islands would have been joined to the mainland and therefore could have been reached on foot. The second step is to make sure that no one was on the island at the time when the first seafarers reached it. Islands like Lemnos and Gokc¸eada in the North Aegean were part of the mainland until the end of the Pleistocene and therefore ¨ the Palaeolithic material found on them cannot be used to imply seafaring at this time (papers by Efstatiou, and Ozbek and Burc ¨ ¸in). Similarly, the possibility that Sicily may have been attached to the mainland in the Late Glacial Maximum could account for the earliest undisputed evidence for Homo Sapiens on the island around 15,500 BC (paper by Mannino). The third step is to explore the inferences of the earliest archaeological remains found on the island, both the cultural implications (where from and when?) and the faunal implications (what animals did they bring with them and how?). These are crucial issues to which we shall return. The fourth step is the simple check that there is no other way to explain the human presence other than by seafaring. This is the Sherlock Holmes test: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ The nice scientific logic of all this is self-evident but in reality it may not be that simple. The old adage that all wise archaeologists chant to themselves incessantly—‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’—is crucial to take into account. The fact that no evidence of Mesolithic activity has been found on a particular island does not mean © 2016 The Author. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology © 2016 The Nautical Archaeology Society. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. REVIEWS to say that there is none. The point is neatly made in Bailey’s paper, which emphasizes the importance of studying now-submerged land surfaces around the islands that might well have been the first areas settled. The first of the case studies, and in many ways the most revealing, focuses on Cyprus, which, because of the deep seas around it, must have been an off-shore island for at least the past 20,000 years. Intensive and high-quality fieldwork over the past two decades has shown that between 10,500 and 7000 BC the island received settlers from the nearby mainland, from Turkey or the Levant or both. Since the chronology of the successive cultures—EpiPalaeolithic, pre-pottery Neolithic A and pre-pottery Neolithic B—is crucial to our understanding. It is dealt with fully in two useful papers by Davis and Manning. The possible homeland of the migrants is considered by Briois and Guilaine, and by Bar-Yosef, while Bar-Yosef Mayer, focusing on the early Neolithic of the Levant, shows how the exploitation of marine resources reflects on the seafaring activities of the mainlanders and their increasing interest in the sea. This essential background creates the context against which the Cypriot sites of Akrotiri–Aetokremnos (by Simmons) and Aspros and Nissi Beach (by Ammerman) can be considered. The artefactual evidence for communities sailing to Cyprus in this period is put into a vivid new light by a consideration of the faunal remains that the immigrants brought with them, both intentionally and unintentionally (by Vigne and colleagues). The story to emerge so far suggests that the first human contact with Cyprus began about 10,500 BC and is best represented in the cave deposit at Akrotiri–Aetokremnos, stratum 2 (there is still some disagreement about whether humans were responsible for the death of a large number of pigmy hippo found in stratum 4 below). Stratum 2 is well dated and has produced implements of Epi-Palaeolithic kind together with food refuse including shellfish, fish and birds, all appropriate to coastal foragers. The layer also produced remains of at least two pigs that were not native to the island. The implication is that pigs (wild boar) must have been brought to the island by boat either at this time or before. Transporting wild boar across more than 100 km of open sea in sufficient numbers to create a breeding population was no mean feat. Then followed the first farmers arriving around 8800 BC. The first ships brought not only dogs to help in the hunt, and the seed grain needed for establishing cultivation, but also mice—an unintentional consequence that soon demanded the deliberate importation of cats. Soon after the middle of the 9th millennium cattle, goats, sheep, fallow deer and domesticated pigs began to be introduced, the fallow deer and the sheep being the last arrivals around 8000 BC. The immigration of humans and animals, both domesticated and wild, to the island over these crucial 2000 years raises many questions about the seafaring capabilities of the people. Nothing is known for certain about the boats used, whether logboats, reed-bundle boats, hide boats or rafts, but sturdy boats there must have been with sailors assured enough to make repeated journeys. In considering these matters Vigne and his colleagues make the point that to transport young wild pigs in a logboat would have been quite possible since the trussed-up beasts would not have suffered unduly by being laid in the bottom of such a vessel. Once on land and set free their prolific rate of breeding would soon have stocked the island with game. But the transport of ruminants by the first Neolithic farmers was a different matter altogether. It required more substantial boats, to allow the animals to stand up on the journey, and a faster sailing time so that they would survive. Flimsy vessels of reed bundles and skin would have been no use and rafts too slow. The solution suggested is that two or more logboats were fixed together to form a catamaran with a platform built across them on which the animals could have stood suitably tethered. Since speed was essential—no more than 10 hours at sea if the animals were to survive—some kind of sail would probably have been rigged. Even the humble mouse has a tale to tell. Mice breed fast, and if the community is isolated natural mutation of the genes will soon lead to evolutionary drift giving rise to mice with characteristics differing increasingly from the parent population. The fact that the mouse population on Cyprus showed no evolutionary drift means that there was a constant inflow of new mice from the mainland, at least twice a year and probably more frequently. In other words by the 9th millennium BC boats were frequently sailing between Cyprus and the mainland showing that seafaring was now firmly established in the Mediterranean. Why people should take to the sea to make long open-sea crossings in the first place is debated in several papers; the consensus view being that the development was in some ways linked to the brief period of cold dry weather, known as the Younger Dryas, which gripped the northern hemisphere between 10,800 and 9600 BC. The sudden onset of this climactic downturn, which may have been caused by a cosmic airburst (paper by Moore and Kennett), would have disrupted normal foraging systems causing populations to explore new ecological niches including the littoral zone. Once the benefits of coastal foraging became evident, population pressures would have encouraged the more adventurous coastal dwellers to explore the sea more extensively. This compulsion, together with the hard-wired inquisitiveness that distinguishes humans, would have given the impetus to the beginnings of seafaring. The second case study focuses on the Aegean. New discoveries of Mesolithic sites on Aegean islands, many of them exchanging obsidian coming mostly from Melos, allow networks of connectivity to be distinguished linking the islands together and with the mainland. The material remains are presented by Kaczanowska and Kozłowski while the implications for early voyaging are carefully assessed by Sampson. These Mesolithic maritime networks provided the system that later allowed early farmers to spread from Asia Minor to the Greek mainland around 7000 BC. Crete occupies a central place in the debate. Here carefully targeted fieldwork on the south of the island near Plakias in 2008–2009, to search for Mesolithic occupation, has brought some surprises. The hoped-for Mesolithic © 2016 The Author. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology © 2016 The Nautical Archaeology Society. 207 NAUTICAL ARCHAEOLOGY, 45.1 sites were identified, allowing Crete to take its place in the Mesolithic Aegean maritime networks, but the fieldwork team also found artefacts that they consider to be of Acheulean type from eight different locations, those from one location coming from a stratified context dated by OSL to 100,000–80,000 years ago. This totally unexpected discovery is described in detail by Runnels and colleagues and its implications for the dispersal of early hominids ‘out of Africa’ are reviewed. The discovery raises huge questions: Are the artefacts really Acheulean? Could they have been brought there across land bridges and so on? But if we accept the dating and the probability that Crete was an island at the time, the whole question of the origins of seafaring is opened up to an entirely new debate—a debate that will force us to reconsider totally our preconceptions about the intellectual capabilities of early humans. Yet, is it so surprising that human beings, who journeyed out of Africa to people the whole of Eurasia and later, around 50,000 years ago crossed the open sea to Australia, should have sailed to Crete? This is a debate that will run and run and we can expect more surprises. The final section deals with the Central and Western Mediterranean. Moore describes the spread of farming to the Adriatic coast, Mannino gives an overview of voyaging foragers in the Central Mediterranean, while Zilhao considers ˜ the spread of Neolithic systems to Iberia and the Maghreb. Mannino’s conclusion is that there is yet no convincing evidence to suggest that the ‘true’ islands, Sicily, Corsica/Sardinia and the Balearics, were reached by sea before about 8000 BC. That is more than 2000 years after seafaring had developed in the Eastern Mediterranean. The arrival of farming also came later, reaching the Adriatic coast of Dalmatia around 6000 BC. Thereafter the spread was very rapid with farming enclaves, using the sea to establish themselves on islands and on coast, eventually reaching the Atlantic coast of Portugal by 5500 BC. It was astonishingly fast, almost as if driven on by a compulsion to reach the extreme west. Given that we now know how important the pre-existence of Mesolithic maritime networks were to the later spread of farming practices to Cyprus and Greece, it would be very surprising if similar networks did not exist in the Western and Central Mediterranean facilitating the spectacular advance of the farmers in the second half of the 6th millennium. Here is an area of study that clearly needs to be addressed by programmes of carefully focused fieldwork of the kind that have so dramatically altered our understanding of early seafaring in the East Mediterranean and the Aegean. Archaeology is always work in progress. Everyone interested in the history of seafaring are in debt to Albert Ammerman and his co-workers for providing us with this rich and stimulating state-of-the-art review. The subject has been moved on to a new threshold and we can now begin to glimpse some of the excitements ahead. BARRY CUNLIFFE Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, England Rivers in Prehistory ANDREA VIANELLO (Ed.) with 10 Contributors 166 pp., 115 illustrations, 51 colour, 9 tables Archaeopress, Gordon House, 276 Banbury Rd, Oxford OX2 7ED, 2015, £38 (sbk), £32.29 (e-Pub), ISBN 978-1784911782, ISBN 978-1784911799 This compendium is derived from a selection of river-related lectures presented at the 2008 WAC-6 Congress in Cork, Ireland, and at the 2009 meeting of the EAA in Riva del Garda, North Italy. As a group of papers cherry-picked from two international conferences on the basis of a single subject area it is not therefore a true ‘proceedings’, but rather a series of selected perceptual and theoretical studies that, as a group, examines aspects of the role played by rivers in prehistory. Much of the content might be applied to other periods too. The first 34 pages are devoted to an ‘Introduction’ and two scene-setting essays entitled ‘Rivers, Where Humankind Meets Nature’ and ‘Rivers of Civilisation’. Though this eclectic and often ground-breaking prelude is not attributed to a named author, the book’s launch at the 2015 EAA Conference in Glasgow (viewable at approach are non-prescriptive, emphasizing the dichotomy between the physical attributes of riverine environments and the varied and not always logical responses of human societies to them. The same is true of scholarly study, as he and his fellow authors confirm in their varied offerings. Slick generalizations and explanatory theories are notably absent; in their place are factual observations, questions and paradoxes. This combination of papers does not constitute a text book, but it is a good foundation for debate and progress in this neglected field. Rivers are corridors of communication, sources of food, and providers of the water that sustains all life. They also affect relationships between human communities and their environments. While all rivers shape the terrain according to predictable geomorphological processes, people perceive and utilise them in different ways. With the advent of farming in the Neolithic, increasing river dependence becomes evident with irrigation and flood control, 208 © 2016 The Authors. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology © 2016 The Nautical Archaeology Society. REVIEWS and associated environmental stress, particularly drought. Six major watercourses are singled out as key drivers of the civilization process—the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Danube, the Indus, and the Yangtze. The ten case studies that form the core of the book begin with Nicolas Lira’s study of logboats from northern ´ Patagonia. This considers not only the vessels themselves, based largely on relatively recent survivals and 17thcentury written sources, but also the navigational systems along the networks of waterways that penetrate this largely forested region. The routeways are characterized as discontinuous but interconnected, in that they only makes sense if the ‘pedestrian trajectories’ that link watercourses are taken into consideration. This builds on Eric Reith’s important work on navigational cultures (Des Bateaux et des Fleuves, Paris, 1998), and demonstrates links between material resources, their suitability for specific uses, and their use in particular regions. Ilze Loze summarizes the extensive work on hydrological regimes of Lake Lubans and its surrounding wetlands ¯ during the Stone Age in eastern Latvia. Rich environmental and archaeological evidence is used to quantify transgressions and regressions of water-level during the Holocene, and evidence from two key sites is presented. The first, at Zvidze close to the northern edge of the wetland area, has produced a waterlogged stratigraphy supported by 41 radiocarbon dates extending from the Late Mesolithic to the Early and Middle Neolithic. Early Neolithic contexts include pole-and-wickerwork fish-traps, in one of which the remains of 16 pike were found. Middle Neolithic deposits yielded faunal samples that provide a quantified snapshot of contemporary fish and bird species. Another excavation at Abrora, further north, provides similar faunal data for the Late Neolithic, while further fishing-related structures include remarkably well-preserved creels and related equipment. Dragos¸ Gheorghiu presents an intriguing study, which he sub-titles ‘an exercise in archaeological imagination’, based on discoveries at Gobekli Tepe, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) site in south-eastern Anatolia. It seeks to ¨ demonstrate that PPN hunter-gatherer populations regarded rivers not only as a means of subsistence but as elements of a cosmological map. A feature at Gobekli Tepe is an enclosure with several T-shaped monoliths on ¨ which zoomorphic and other images are inscribed. Gheorghiu identifies parallel lines running up and down the stones as river banks, within which fish and crustaceans abound. Terrestrial animals and birds line the banks, and occasionally appear in the river too. In one instance a group of fishes is lined up along the river bank, where symbols that the author believes may represent a fish-trap have been inserted. He goes on to compare his interpretation of this river-related symbolism with Byzantine cartography depicted in the so-called Madaba map; a mosaic purporting to show the mouth of the Jordan River at its junction with the Red Sea. The argument is intriguing, if not altogether archaeological. Paolo Bellintani and Massimo Saracino next consider the nature of rivers, human occupation, and exchange around the Late Bronze Age settlement of Frattesina in the Po valley of north-east Italy. This is a wide-ranging paper that characterizes the region as a gateway between Europe and the Mediterranean, based on the distributions of amber, glass, pottery and metalwork. It is followed by Vianello’s more specialized contribution on the lake peoples of northern Italy, from the earliest-known pile-house village at Marmotta, 32 km north-west of Rome, where timbers have been dendrochronologically dated to 5690 BCE. The remainder of the paper concentrates on the massive clusters of lake dwellings in northern Italy that date from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Also considered is the so-called Bedolina Map, a Bronze Age petroglyph from the Camonica Valley in Lombardy. It has been interpreted as a topographic map, apparently showing buildings, routeways, and people, though these claims have been disputed. Less controversial is the Roman funerary monument recovered from the Venice Lagoon in 1837. The pile-building theme of the paper concludes with representations showing the uncovering of early pile-based structures in Venice during reclamation work in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ulla Rajala of Cambridge University has undertaken a detailed study of fluvial landscapes through the lenses of Nepi and Gabii, two settlements on either side of the Tiber. The physical settings, artefact distributions, viewsheds (a Cambridge speciality) and cultural imperatives drive changes from the Chalcolithic (2700–1800 BCE) to the Roman periods and in so doing influence the evolution of the Tiber landscape more generally. In separate papers Peter Chowne (‘Bronze Age Barrow Complexes on the Lincolnshire Fen Margin’) and Tim Malim (‘Roads, Routes, and Ceremonies: the Fenland Superhighway’) provide a natural foil to the north Italian fluvial landscapes considered above. Chowne’s paper makes extensive use of LiDAR imaging to identify and interpret the relationships between round-barrow complexes, ancient watercourses, and wider patterns of movement and use of land on the fen margin. Malim’s contribution is more overtly archaeological and results from his 20 years’ involvement in fenland research. It includes a suggested typology for wetland causeway structures based on the remarkable survivals of piles, hurdles, and brushwood constructions preserved in anaerobic conditions. They date mainly from the Bronze and Iron Ages. This evidence, supplemented by artefact distributions and metalwork hoards, informs the identification of major routeways in the area. Amy Bunce’s paper considers Irish turloughs (dry lakes), discontinuous seasonal bodies of water that fill during winter or after heavy rainfall when underground reservoirs spill through the surface to create enigmatic disappearing lakes. Their relevance to prehistoric settlement, particularly during the Neolithic, is discussed, and their relationship to associated crannogs considered. These almost uniquely Irish features have been severely affected by modern drainage. © 2016 The Authors. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology © 2016 The Nautical Archaeology Society. 209 NAUTICAL ARCHAEOLOGY, 45.1 Edith Ortiz D´ıaz concludes the volume with an overview of fluvial networks in the Papaloapan Basin in Mexico from pre-hispanic periods to the early 20th century, based largely on documentary and ethnographic evidence. It is a fitting conclusion to the book, demonstrating that human associations with rivers are not static but shift with changing patterns of perception, belief, cultural imperatives, resource management, and transport, from remote prehistory to the present day. The volume as a whole carries an important message. Like the sea and things nautical, rivers and lakes have for too long been ‘elephants in the rooms’ of archaeologists and historians, so obvious that they are effectively invisible. Andrea Vianello and his fellow authors have revealed them as essential elements in holistic landscape studies, without which life could not function. It is up to others to follow their example. English is not the first language of most of the authors. Errors and linguistic infelicities abound, often obscuring meaning when complex issues are discussed. This should not be blamed on the academic editor and his fellow