Mediterranean Connections ─ Maritime Transport Containers and Seaborne Trade in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages

This volume focuses on the origin and development of the maritime transport container from the Early Bronze through early Iron Age periods (ca. 3200-700 BC). This category of objects gives us a better understanding of ancient Mediterranean interregional connections, including the roles that shipwrecks, seafaring, and coastal communities played in interaction and exchange. These containers have often been the subject of specific and detailed pottery studies, but have seldom been examined as central to understanding connectivity and trade in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. This broad study

-considers the likely origins of these types of vessels;
-traces their development and spread throughout the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean as archetypal organic bulk cargo containers;
-discusses the wider impact on Mediterranean connections, transport, and trade over a period of 2500 years covering the Bronze and early Iron Ages.

Classical and Near Eastern archaeologists and historians, as well as maritime archaeologists, will find this extensively researched volume an important addition to their library.

A. Bernard Knapp is Emeritus Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute. He co-edits the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology with John F. Cherry and Peter van Dommelen and is the general editor of the series Monographs in Mediterranean Archaeology. He is the author and editor of several books including, most recently, The Archaeology of Cyprus: From Earliest Prehistory through the Bronze Age (2013), and The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze-Iron Age Mediterranean (2014), co-edited with Peter van Dommelen. Stella Demesticha is Associate Professor of Maritime Archaeology in the Archaeological Research Unit, Department of History and Archaeology, University of Cyprus. She specializes in maritime archaeology, with special interests in shipwreck amphorae, ancient seaborne trade routes and economy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Over the past 20 years, she has participated in many land and underwater archaeological projects in Greece and Cyprus. In 2011 she established the Maritime Archaeological Research Laboratory (MARELab) in the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus. She currently directs three ongoing underwater field projects (the Mazotos and the Nissia Shipwreck Projects and the Xylophagou Anchorage Project), and coordinates all MARELab research programmes. Her most recent publication is an edited volume: Per Terram, Per Mare: Seaborne Trade and the Distribution of Roman Amphorae in the Mediterranean (2015). Robert Martin is in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto. Catherine E. Pratt is in the Department of Classical Studies, University of Western Ontario.