Islands in Time

Island Sociogeography and Mediterranean Prehistory

Mark Patton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134799923
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Islands in Time explores the ecological and cultural development of prehistoric island societies. It considers the prehistory of the Mediterranean and offers an explanation of the effects of isolation on the development of human communities.
Evidence is drawn from a broad range of Mediterranean islands including Cyprus, Crete and the Cyclades, Malta, Lipari, Corsica and Sardinia.

1

ISLANDS IN TIME: AN INTRODUCTION

Islands have always held a particular fascination for people. For some, it is the isolation and relative security of island life that is attractive, the opportunity to escape from ‘reality’ as defined by other people and to reinvent it for oneself. For others, it is the challenge of coping in a harsh environment, with limited resources, that draws them towards islands, the opportunity to prove one’s ‘independence’. Whatever the attraction of islands, they feature prominently in European mythology (Circe’s island in Homer’s Odyssey, the ‘Isles of the Blessed’ of Celtic legend), literature (Shakespeare’s Tempest, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Golding’s Lord of the Flies) and popular culture (movies such as Blue Lagoon, musicals such as South Pacific and the radio series Desert Lsland Discs). Islands also feature prominently in archaeological literature: the islands of the Mediterranean in particular have attracted a great deal of research interest, from Sir Arthur Evans’ (1921) and Sir Themistocles Zammit’s (1930) early studies, to more recent work by John Evans (1971a), Renfrew (1972) and Renfrew and Wagstaff (1982). Turning to social anthropology, many of the classic ethnographic monographs concern island societies, from Malinowski’s (1922) study of exchange systems in the Trobriand Islands, to Deacon’s (1934) and Layard’s (1942) studies of initiation rites and megalithic ritual in Malekula and Mead’s (1943) study of sexuality and adolescence in Samoa. These studies, both archaeological and ethnographic, have had a profound influence on the theory and practice of contemporary archaeology. Until recently, however, little attention has been paid to the fact that these studies are specifically concerned with island societies. Today, archaeologists working in areas such as the Mediterranean and the Pacific are increasingly looking at the question of insularity. To what extent is it legitimate to use island studies as the basis for more general models of social structure and cultural change (Evans 1973)? Do island societies have specific features which set them apart from continental communities (Evans 1977; Kirch 1986)? What are the ecological and cultural effects of insularity (Fosberg 1963; Cherry 1981; Terrell 1986)? These are the questions which will be addressed in this book. It is, first and foremost, a book about islands rather than a book about Mediterranean prehistory, but theoretical questions are best considered in relation to specific data, and the Mediterranean region has a large number of islands (Cherry (1981) lists 115) of varying sizes and degrees of remoteness (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2), many of which have relatively well understood archaeological sequences. The book will focus specifically on the archaeology of the Mediterranean islands between the end of the last Ice Age and the emergence of classical civilisation (arbitrarily set at 500 cal. BC). Because of its theoretical orientation, it is hoped that the book will be relevant to archaeologists and anthropologists outside the field of Mediterranean prehistory. At its core is the fundamental question of the relationship between human society and the natural environment: because insularity more so than any other environmental variable is clearly defineable, it is of particular interest in any attempt to understand this relationship. The first two chapters of the book will look at the theoretical background to island studies, and this will be followed by explorations of particular themes in Mediterranean insular prehistory: colonisation, ecology, elaboration and continuity, and networks of interaction. The examples used are necessarily and intentionally selective, the aim being to explore the relationship between insularity and culture, rather than to write a ‘definitive’ prehistory of the Mediterranean islands.

THE CONCEPT OF THE ‘ISLAND LABORATORY’

John Evans (1973) must be credited with introducing discussion of insularity into the discourse of contemporary theoretical archaeology. He argued that islands could be seen as ‘laboratories for the study of cultural process’, since insularity ‘tends to eliminate some of the variables which afflict the student of mainland groups, and whose effect is often so difficult to assess.’

Islands generally have a limited range of available resources. This allows the archaeologist to study ways in which a community has adapted to its natural environment, and can also provide unequivocal evidence for external contacts if resources not naturally present on a given island are found there in an archaeological context. In a mainland context, it is more difficult to define the ‘environment’ of a given community or to identify ‘external’ contacts, since this requires us to draw an artifical boundary around that community, and to define the area outside this boundary as ‘external’. On an island, this boundary is not artificial, it is provided by the coast, and contact with other communities requires a deliberate sea voyage.

Evans stresses, however, that the sea, as well as dividing and isolating communities, may also be an effective means of communication between them, and suggests that this provides an opportunity ‘to study the related development of small, discrete communities, to observe the mutual effect of their contacts, and to follow the development of differences between them’.

Figure 1.1 Distribution of the Mediterranean islands in terms of size (km²) and distance from nearest mainland

Source: Cherry 1981

Figure 1.2 Map of the Mediterranean region, showing the major islands and island groups

Note: 1 The Balearic Islands; 2 Corsica; 3 Sardinia; 4 Elba; 5 The Aeolian Islands; 6 Sicily; 7 Pantelleria; 8 The Maltese Islands; 9 The Ionian Islands; 10 Euboiea; 11 The Sporadic Islands; 12 The North Aegean Islands; 13 The Dodecanese Islands; 14 The Cycladic Islands; 15 Crete; 16 Cyprus

In a later paper, Evans (1977) contrasts the Mediterranean situation with that in the Pacific, where islands are far more isolated, and where colonisation of an island was in many cases followed by development in total isolation, something which rarely, if ever, happened in the Mediterranean.

Evans’ argument is primarily a methodological one: the cultural processes with which he is concerned are not specific to island communities, but affect all societies. Islands, however, provide an ideal opportunity to study these processes, since the relevant variables are fewer, and are more easily defined and controlled.

In developing the idea of the ‘island laboratory’, Evans follows in a tradition of research established by Charles Darwin. In The Origin of Species, Darwin (1968 [1859]) effectively used the Galapagos Islands as a laboratory of evolutionary processes. Darwin suggested that, following isolation, a plant or animal population would follow a separate evolutionary trajectory to its parent population on the mainland. He showed that, of the twenty-six species of land birds on the Galapagos, twenty-one of these were peculiar to the islands, and some were specific to particular islands in the Galapagos group: these species, although closely related to South American species, were none the less distinctly different. He saw this as conclusive evidence for independent evolution after isolation, and stated that this made no sense in relation to the ‘creationist theory’.

The ‘theory of island biogeography’, developed by MacArthur and Wilson (1967) represents an attempt to quantify the variables involved in the colonisation of islands by animal and plant species, and in the subsequent evolution or extinction of these species. Like Darwin, MacArthur and Wilson were concerned with the possible role of islands as laboratories of evolutionary and ecological process. At the end of their book they suggest that an island, surrounded by water, can be seen as a model for ecosystems more generally: most ecosystems (forests, streams, heathland, etc.) are surrounded by areas of fundamentally different ecology, so that the colonisation of these ecosystems by animal and plant species, and the subsequent development of those species, will be affected by broadly the same variables as can be observed in an island context. In an island situation, however, these variables are more easily defined and controlled, making islands ideal laboratories for the study of ecological processes. Although MacArthur’s and Wilsons theory was not developed with human communities in mind, it has had a considerable influence on archaeological studies of insularity (cf. Cherry 1981; Terrell 1986), and this is a theme to which we will return in Chapter 2.

FEATURES OF ISLAND SOCIETIES

The concept of the ‘island laboratory’ depends on the assumption that the processes affecting island communities are the same as those affecting mainland communities, or at least that the differences between them are differences of degree rather than of kind. There are, none the less, certain specific features of island communities which need to be examined.

A number of authors have pointed out that ecological limitation is a general feature of island life. Darwin (1968 [1859], 453) noted that: ‘The number of species of all kinds which inhabit oceanic islands are few in number compared with those on equal continental areas.’

MacArthur and Wilson (1967) suggested that the biodiversity of an island will vary in direct proportion to a function of the island’s size (i.e. larger islands can support a greater number of species) and in inverse proportion to a function of its distance from the mainland (i.e. more remote islands will tend to support fewer species). Reduced biodiversity in an island context is likely to require significant adaptation on the part of colonising human populations. Evans (1973) argues that this limitation makes islands ideal laboratories for the study of human adaptations to the natural environment, whilst Renfrew and Wagstaff (1982), in the introduction to their study of Melos, focus on this limitation in biodiversity as a ‘significant characteristic of the island ecosystem’. For human communities, however, this limitation may potentially be offset by other factors. The reduced biodiversity of an island ecosystem applies only to terrestrial resources: the resources of the sea will be as rich as on any other coastal area, and may be equally important to human communities. A small island such as Malta or Melos allows all communities direct access to the sea, providing an important nutritional ‘safety net’, as well as an element of dietary diversity, which may actually give island communities an advantage over their land-locked counterparts. Islands may also have specific non-biological resources (such as obsidian on Melos) which may be used in exchange with communities on other islands and adjacent mainlands.

The relationship between a human population and its natural environment is a complex and reciprocal one. Having colonised an island, a human community must adapt to the new environment, otherwise, like any other animal community, it will face extinction. Human populations, however, may also have a dramatic effect on the environment itself. Evidence for significant resource depletion following human colonisation of an island has been noted, for example, on the Pacific island of Tikopia (Kirch and Yen 1982) and on the Reef Islands (Green 1976). The human impact on the environment may be apparent from its effect on the landscape itself as well as from declining biodiversity (Kirch and Yen op, cit.). In some cases the extent of this human impact may be so great as to provoke a collapse of the social system, or even threaten the survival of the human population, as argued by Bahn and Flenley (1992) in the case of Easter Island. In the Mediterranean, the degree of isolation of islands is very much less than in the Pacific, and ecological limitations consequently less extreme. The human impact on the environment, however, may none the less be significant: the most recent evidence from Cyprus (Simmons 1991) suggests that Mesolithic hunter—gatherer groups were responsible for the extinction of the pygmy elephant and hippopotamus on which their economy depended. There is no apparent continuity between the newly recognised Mesolithic of Cyprus and the earliest Neolithic of the island, and it seems very likely that hunter-gatherers either left the island, or followed their prey into extinction. The prehistoric human ecology of the Mediterranean islands will be considered in detail in Chapter 4.

If islands have certain specific ecological features, do human communities on islands also have particular cultural features? Evans (1973) notes that: ‘Island communities often display a tendency towards the exaggerated development of some aspect of their culture, which is often connected with ceremonial.’ This elaboration of culture in the island context, which Evans (1977) explores with reference to the Maltese temples, has also been noted and discussed by anthropologists working in the Pacific region (cf. Vayda and Rappaport 1963; Sahlins 1955). Easter Island is an obvious example of this phenomenon (Bahn and Flenley 1992), but we could also look, for example, at the megalithic traditions of Malekula (New Hebrides), as described by Deacon (1934) and Layard (1942). Whilst isolation can give rise to distinctive and original manifestations of culture, however, it can equally give rise to significant conservatism. Renfrew and Wagstaff (1982) argue that protection from outside competition in an insular context may give rise to: ‘the preservation of archaic ... or possibly ill-adapted forms’. Melas (1985), for example, has convincingly shown that Minoan material culture forms survived on the island of Karpathos long after they had disappeared from the rest of the Aegean. These themes of cultural elaboration and conservatism will be explored in Chapter 5.

Much of the ethnographic literature on island societies has focused on elaborate networks of interaction and exchange, such as the ‘Kula ring of Melanesia (Malinowski 1922). Recent research (cf. Leach and Leach 1983) has shown how important these networks can be in relation to the social structure of the communities involved, and the political strategies of the individuals within them. In the prehistory of the Mediterranean there is extensive evidence for exchange between islands involving, for example, the exchange of obsidian from Mesolithic times onwards. Chapter 6 will look at the social and political significance of inter-island and island/mainland interaction in Mediterranean prehistory.

DEFINING INSULARITY

One of the first problems which must be addressed concerns the definition of insularity: what exactly do we mean by an island? A dictionary definition might describe an island as ‘an area of land surrounded on all sides by water’, but how meaningful is this definition in an archaeological context? With the benefit of modern maps and satellite images, we know that Australia is an island, but it is difficult to imagine pre-contact aborigines being aware of it as such. Euboia and Sicily are both islands, but are so close to the mainland as to render this insularity meaningless (the distances concerned would, for example, pose no problem to a reasonably proficient human swimmer). Certainly we would not expect to find any significant reduction of biodiversity on these ‘islands’, nor would we expect their prehistoric inhabitants to be in any sense isolated from their mainland neighbours. MacArthur and Wilson (1967) suggest that island size and distance from mainland are the most significant variables, at least in determining the extent of biodiversity on a given island, and these variables are also likely to be important in defining the extent to which the islands are perceived as such by their inhabitants. None of the Mediterranean islands are so large that they would not be seen as islands. Even on Sardinia, the largest truly ‘insular’ island, the maximum distance of any point from the sea is around 65 km. Equally, unlike the Pacific, none are so remote as to suggest that communities would be totally ‘closed’ (the most remote islands are the Maltese group, around 250 km from the nearest mainland). There is, none the less, a considerable diversity among the Mediterranean islands in terms of their size and distance from the mainland, as shown by Figure 1.1.

THE MEDITERRANEAN: A GEOGRAPHICAL AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL BACKGROUND

The Mediterranean sea extends from the Levant in the east to Iberia in the west (a distance of 3700 km), and from the Po estuary in the north to the Libyan coast in the south (a distance of 1800 km). Within this sea are 115 islands, most of which are relatively small (only Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, Corsica, Crete, Euboia and Mallorca have surface areas greater than 2000 km²), and within sight either of an adjacent mainland or of another island which serves as a ‘stepping stone’ (the only exceptions to this being the islands of Lampedusa, Linosa and Lampione in the central Mediterranean).

The Mediterranean basin was formed by the separation of the African and European plates, around 150 million years ago. Geologically the area is dominated by limestones, though there are significant outcrops of igneous rock on Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Cyprus. Around much of the Mediterranean coast there is no extensive coastal plain, instead, mountains rise rapidly behind the coast – Mount Etna in Sicily, the Appenines of Italy, the Dinaric Alps in Dalmatia, the Pindus range in Greece, the Taurus Mountains of Anatolia and the Maritime Atlas of the Maghreb. The climate is relatively homogeneous, with hot, dry summers and mild winters. Vegetation is dominated by light woodland and (especially where this has been cleared by human activity), maquis. The soils are in many cases thin and, being calcareous, often lacking in groundwater, particularly in the dry summers.

The prehistoric sequence in the Mediterranean region has been admirably summarised by Trump (1980). Lower Palaeolithic material has been found on a number of Mediterranean sites, including Vallonet (de Lumley et al 1963) and Terra Amata (de Lumley 1967) in France and Puig d’en Roca in Spain (Canal and Carbonell 1979). At Tautavel (de Lumley and de Lumley 1971) in France, and at Petralona (Stringer et al 1979) in Greece, Lower Palaeolithic material was found in association with early hominid remains. This evidence shows that the Mediterranean region was first colonised by people around a million years ago. There is, however, no conclusive evidence for Lower Palaeolithic settlement on any of the Mediterranean islands, apart from Euboia (Micha-Sarantea 1980) and Sicily (Bianchini 1969) which, as we have already seen, cannot be considered as truly insular (and which, during cold periods of the Pleistocene, would have been joined to the mainland). A series of flint assemblages from the Anglona region of Sardinia have been claimed as Lower Palaeolithic (Area et al. 1982), but these are unstratified assemblages, identified as ‘Clactonian’ purely on typological grounds. Middle Palaeolithic material has been found on the islet of Mikro Kokkinokastro (Cherry 1981), off the southwest of Halonissos (one of the Northern Sporadic Islands), and on the central Mediterranean island of Elba (Lanfranchi and Weiss 1973). Again, however, we must bear in mind the relevant palaeo-geographical factors: during glacial periods these islands would have been connected by land bridges to the continent, so that the presence of Palaeolithic material may not be relevant to the question of island colonisation. More recently, however, Middle Palaeolithic material has been found on Kephallenia (Kavvadias 1984) which, though joined to Ithaca and Zakynthos during much of the Pleistocene, was never part of the mainland.

Throughout the Upper Palaeolithic period, the climate of the Mediterranean area was significantly drier and cooler than it is today. Faunal evidence shows the presence of horse, reindeer, mammoth and marmot, whilst palynological evidence suggests a predominance of grassland, with small areas of pine and deciduous woodland (Trump 1980). Flint industries of broadly Aurignacian type have been identified in Italy, as at Grimaldi and Arene Candide, in Gibralter and at the site of Haua Fteah in Libya. At Grimaldi and Arene Candide, deliberate human burials were found, covered with red ochre and associated with shell beads. In the west Mediterranean the Upper Palaeolithic sequence closely follows the classic southwest French pattern, as illustrated by the cave of Parpallo in Spain, which has a stratified sequence from Gravettian to Solutrean and Magdalenian flint industries (Trump 1980). The Gravettian levels of this site are also of particular interest, owing to the presence of painted and engraved plaques. Upper Palaeolithic material is present on Sicily (Cherry 1981), at Levanzo in the Egadi Islands (Graziosi 1953...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 ISLANDS IN TIME: AN INTRODUCTION
• 2 APPROACHES TO ISLAND ARCHAEOLOGY
• 3 THE COLONISATION OF THE MEDITERRANEAN ISLANDS
• 4 INSULARITY AND HUMAN ECOLOGY
• 5 ELABORATION AND CONTINUITY IN MEDITERRANEAN ISLAND PREHISTORY
• 6 NETWORKS OF INTERACTION IN MEDITERRANEAN ISLAND PREHISTORY
• 7 ISLAND SOCIOGEOGRAPHY AND MEDITERRANEAN PREHISTORY
• Bibliography
• Index