The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean

Description

The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean offers new insights into the material and social practices of many different Mediterranean peoples during the Bronze and Iron Ages, presenting in particular those features that both connect and distinguish them. Contributors discuss in depth a range of topics that motivate and structure Mediterranean archaeology today, including insularity and connectivity; mobility, migration, and colonization; hybridization and cultural encounters; materiality, memory, and identity; community and household; life and death; and ritual and ideology. The volume's broad coverage of different approaches and contemporary archaeological practices will help practitioners of Mediterranean archaeology to move the subject forward in new and dynamic ways. Together, the essays in this volume shed new light on the people, ideas, and materials that make up the world of Mediterranean archaeology today, beyond the borders that separate Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

A. Bernard Knapp is Emeritus Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Glasgow and Honorary Research Fellow at the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute in Nicosia. He has held research appointments at the University of Sydney, the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, the University of Cambridge, and Macquarie University (Sydney). His research interests include archaeological theory (such as insularity and island archaeology, social identity, gender, hybridization practices), archaeological landscapes and regional archaeologies, and Bronze Age Mediterranean prehistory generally. He is co-editor of the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology and editor of the series Monographs in Mediterranean Archaeology. His most recent book is The Archaeology of Cyprus: From Earliest Prehistory through the Bronze Age (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Peter van Dommelen is Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Anthropology at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University. Between 1997 and 2012, he taught Mediterranean Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology of the University of Glasgow. He was visiting professor in the Department of History of the University of the Balearics (Palma de Mallorca) in 2012, in the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Cagliari (Italy) in 2011, and in the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at the University of Valencia (Spain) in 2005-6. His research interests include colonialism, rural households, and landscapes in the (west) Mediterranean, in both ancient and more recent times. In practical terms, he has long been engaged in field survey and ceramic studies in Sardinia, Italy. Founding co-editor of the journal Archaeological Dialogues until 2006, he currently co-edits the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology and sits on the editorial board of World Archaeology. He is co-author of Rural Landscapes of the Punic World (2008).

'A magnificently multi-faceted, intellectually challenging collection of scholarly voices and interpretations that matches the complexity and dynamism of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean itself. This book will be a stimulus to fresh thinking in and beyond the Middle Sea for many years to come, as well as an ideal point of access for the less familiar.' Cyprian Broodbank, John Disney Professor of Archaeology, University of Cambridge 'The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean is ambitious, comparative, thematic, challenging, informative and bang up-to-date, helping readers to grasp the similarities and diversity of Mediterranean communities and societies in the last two millennia BC. The clarity of presentation makes it a pleasure to read.' Bob Chapman, University of Reading 'Widely ranging knowledgeable syntheses of Mediterranean later prehistory that are also theoretically informed are rare; those seeking not to shelter in a regional ghetto but engaging with wider archaeology and history rarer still. This welcome volume is all of the above, and thus both important and special.' Sturt W. Manning, Goldwin Smith Chair of Classical Archaeology and Director of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, Cornell University