Description
Book SynopsisReconstructing a Maritime Past argues that rather than applying geo-ethnic 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, contrasting 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 35 re-interpret the corpus of submerged sites in the Mediterranean Sea with this approach, arguing that this dataset does not represent Phoenician, Muslim, or Byzantine seafaring, but the practices of a maritime culture. Key to this section is the author's method th
Table of Contents
Introduction; Chapter 1 Interpretive practices and interpretive problems; Chapter 2 Theoretical and methodological foundations; Chapter 3 Data collection, interpretation, and visualization; Chapter 4 Modelling maritime cultures and landscapes; Chapter 5 Variation and places; Chapter 6 Case studies; Conclusions
