The Archaeology of Late Bronze Age Interaction and Mobility at the Gates of Europe: People, Things and Networks around the Southern Adriatic Sea

Interaction and mobility have attracted much interest in research within scholarly fields as different as archaeology, history, and more broadly the humanities. Critically assessing some of the most widespread views on interaction and its social impact, this book proposes an innovative perspective which combines radical social theory and currently burgeoning network methodologies. Through an in-depth analysis of a wealth of data often difficult to access, and illustrated by many diagrams and maps, the book highlights connections and their social implications at different scales ranging from the individual settlement to the Mediterranean. The resulting diachronic narrative explores social and economic trajectories over some seven centuries and sheds new light on the broad historical trends affecting the life of people living around the Middle Sea. The Bronze Age is the first period of intense interaction between early state societies of the Eastern Mediterranean and the small-scale communities to the west of Greece, with people and goods moving at a scale previously unprecedented. This encounter is explored from the vantage point of one of its main foci: Apulia, located in the southern Adriatic, at the junction between East and West and the entryway of one of the major routes for the resource-rich European continent.

Table of Contents:
List of Tables List of Figures Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1: An Archaeology of Interaction and Mobility 1.1. A Changing Sea: Social Differentiation and the Mediterranean through the Lens of Later Globalisation 1.2. What is Interaction in Archaeology? 1.3. A Radical Paradigm? 1.4. Spatiality 1.5. Mediterranean Bronze Age Modes of Interaction Chapter 2: The Southern Adriatic: Social Geography, Previous Studies and Prelude to Late Bronze Age Interaction 2.1. The Southern Adriatic: Sea, Lands and Means of Interaction 2.2. Approaches to Adriatic connectivity 2.3. The Prelude to Late Bronze Age Interaction Chapter 3: Early Encounters (1750-1300 BC) 3.1. The Individual Community during the Middle Bronze Age 3.2. The Protoapennine and Apennine Networks 3.3. The Wider Mediterranean Context during the Middle Bronze Age 3.4. The Middle Bronze Age Adriatic Society and its Connections: Modes of Production and of Interaction Chapter 4: From Direct Contact to Brownian Motion: The Southern Adriatic during the Recent Bronze Age (1300-1100 BC) 4.1. The Individual Community during the Recent Bronze Age 4.2. The Small Scale Network during the Recent Bronze Age 4.3. The Wider Mediterranean Context during the Recent Bronze Age 4.4. The Southern Adriatic during the Recent Bronze Age: Modes of Production and Interaction Chapter 5: Old Connections and New Equilibria at the End of the Southern Adriatic Bronze Age (1100-1000 BC) 5.1. The Individual Community during the Final Bronze Age 5.2. The Small Scale Network during the Final Bronze Age 5.3. The Wider Mediterranean Context during the Final Bronze Age 5.4. The Final Bronze Age in the Southern Adriatic: Modes of Production and of Interaction Chapter 6: The Southern Adriatic and the Social Logic of Interaction 6.1. The Southern Adriatic Societies and the Mediterranean in the Longue Durée 6.2. E pluribus unum, ex uno plures? 6.3. The Social Logic of Interaction: Then and Now References