Archaeologically recovered material culture provides the crucial evidence for any long-term perspective on human activity. This chapter therefore grapples with the analytical challenges posed by the material record from Antikythera and then seeks to move beyond these and offer a wider history of island material culture. We begin by devoting methodological attention to the strengths and weaknesses of the archaeological record, particularly as collected by intensive surface survey, and build up a skeleton timeline of human activity on the island that provides a starting point for the two chronologically organised chapters that follow. As discussed in Chapter 2, the commentary provided later in the book can only hope to summarise briefly a considerable amount of focused artefact research whose primary publication is via a full digital catalogue and a series of specialist-led papers (referenced in detail later; see also Bevan and Conolly 2012a, 2012b for access to raw data). Following this chronological discussion, we then address a series of longitudinal, behavioural themes, such as the material culture of storage, transport, cooking, eating, drinking and conflict. A final section anticipates some of the broader concerns of later chapters by outlining ways in which Antikythera exhibits interestingly spiky patterns of both glut and scarcity in terms of its material resources. Again, we seek to place these observations in the wider behavioural context of how local communities have created, maintained and recycled their material world, particularly with regard to the themes of resettlement and recolonisation of landscapes that we first raised in Chapter 2.

This chapter invokes a range of individual agencies behind life on Antikythera over the full history of its documented exploitation by humans. In particular, we wish to understand — via recent history, ethnography and, where possible, archaeological data — the impact of certain kinds of people whose roles, we would argue, are more central on small islands than they would be otherwise. Such people can arguably be lumped under the three broad headings of the eccentric, the specialist and/or the displaced and include hunters, colonists, cash-croppers, monastics, refugees, pirates, exiles, soldiers, hermits, retirees, modern-day tourists, expatriates and indeed various kinds of academic researcher. This chapter continues to emphasise the variable strategies for human mobility and varying degrees of long-term investment that we raised in the preceding chapter, but also argues that such generic parameters are given their structure by some very specific kinds of human personality and immediate circumstance.

PIRATES

Of all of the aforementioned human activities, it is piracy, hunting and herding that have been some of the most persistent occupational attractors in An-tikythera's history. Antikythera offers an opportunity to reconsider existing models of Mediterranean piracy over the long term, and there are four aspects that we wish to emphasise here: (1) useful distinctions of scale and type in piratical activity; (2) the sociology of pinch-points; (3) the ideology of piracy; and (4) the material culture of pirates.

INTRODUCTION

The study of Mediterranean landscapes and of longue durée histories, island cultures and complex human ecologies have all developed into major research agendas over the past half-century, engaging large swathes of the social and natural sciences. This book brings together these established investigative traditions by considering Antikythera, a tiny island perched on the edge of the Aegean and Ionian seas, over the full course of its approximately seven-thousand-year history of documented human activity. As a research setting, this island offers rare advantages. First, small islands (a category we define later in the chapter) are particularly interesting because their plant, animal and human populations can be susceptible to abrupt demographic changes, and, most clearly in the case of humans, often show cycles of colonisation, near or complete abandonment, and recolonisation. Such a comparatively discontinuous record makes it easier to distinguish between different settlement and land use strategies than in many other contexts where the occupation of landscapes may be more continuous. Small islands have thus been invoked as interesting descriptive vignettes from time to time but, surprisingly, have rarely been the focus of systematic Mediterranean landscape-scale research. Antikythera (20.8 km2)is now one of the best-documented examples of these, with a punctuated human presence from the Neolithic through to the present day, and this provides substantial insight into the dynamics of human settlement and ecology over the long term.

Chapter 1 introduced some central themes that underpin much of the discussion found in this book, whilst also disclosing our own motivations in pursuing a Mediterranean small-island study. It emphasised both the attractive micro-context provided by Antikythera, as a window on the wider Mediterranean world, and the opportunities for more joined-up, regional thinking provided by unusually dense levels of archaeological and historical study in the south-west Aegean. This chapter now considers the occasionally mundane, but nonetheless crucial, methodological practicalities of observing material, environmental and historical patterns across Antikythera over its entire observable timespan of human activity. We do not dwell on methodological niceties for their own sake, but instead, consider them crucial for understanding what can and cannot be said on the basis of present evidence. With this perspective in mind, the following sections outline and justify the different fieldwork and other research procedures we have used to understand Antikythera's long-term history.

INTENSIVE SURVEY

Intensive survey is a strategy for recovering information about whole landscapes of human activity via detailed recording and/or collection of artefacts visible on the modern ground surface. It emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a more systematic approach to site reconnaissance, and since then has become commonplace, particularly in those parts of the world boasting a combination of relatively light ground cover and comparatively dense coverings of potsherds, lithics or small structural remains (Fish and Kowalewski 1990; Banning 2002; Alcock and Cherry 2004).

This chapter continues our formal assessment of the long-term history of the island. The previous chapter considered the latest phase of human occupation on Antikythera, beginning in the late eighteenth century AD, and developed some analytical and interpretative methods that could be applied fairly consistently across other periods as well. In this chapter, we therefore jump backwards to the very earliest signs of human exploitation in the later Neolithic and proceed chronologically from then on, using the better-documented, most recent period of settlement as a clear point of comparison and contrast.

EARLIER PREHISTORY

The earliest confirmed evidence of human activity on the island dates to the later Neolithic, probably some 7,000 years ago. While it is possible that the island was visited even earlier (e.g., given recent work on Crete suggesting Lower Palaeolithic activity, Strasser et al. 2011), we were not able to identify confidently any components of the assemblage that are unambiguously pre-Neolithic, and until there are published radiometric dates corroborating the proposed Mesolithic industries on Crete (Strasser et al. 2011, p. 171) prefer a more parsimonious, and later-dated, explanation at this stage. In contrast, and as we discussed in Chapter 4, there is good circumstantial evidence for some kind of exploitation of the island from perhaps the fifth millennium BC, based on a limited number of technological indicators amongst the knapped stone assemblage, particularly the presence of certain obsidian projectile points.

Mediterranean environments and ecologies hold an unusual fascination. As many commentators have pointed out, they are by turns both fragmented and connective, fragile and resilient, surprisingly consistent and yet strangely idiosyncratic (e.g., Braudel 1972, pp. 25—275; Horden and Purcell 2000; Blondel et al. 2010). The physical configuration of the Mediterranean structures the flow of people, plants, animals, objects and ideas in specific directions, with important effects over both the short and long term. Antikythera sits at one of those geographically nodal points where the resulting contrasts and contingencies are particularly powerful. It lies along a set of narrower north-south links between Libya, Crete, Kythera and the Peloponnese, and east-west between the hyper-insular Aegean and the quite different maritime expanses and terrestrial fringes of the Adriatic and Ionian seas. The Mediterranean region's soils, climate, plants and animals have become strongly linked to the success of human populations, and Antikythera experiences both glut and scarcity in terms of such resources. It is a small island, a deceptively bounded entity that encourages various forms of conceptual isolation (for inhabitants, visitors and those who study it alike), but typically also demands forms of subsistence and engagement that extend far beyond its coastline. As we argued in the introduction, its size provides some unusual analytical opportunities as long as we remain careful about how we contextualise it within a wider world.

This chapter brings the book to a close by briefly re-emphasising some of the major themes and challenges raised in previous chapters. Our premise has been that Antikythera's long-term record of human activity is particularly well suited to considering the relationship between particularising themes in the Mediterranean past, with their emphasis on the historical contingencies of small community life, and generalising ones, associated with island biogeography, larger-scale Mediterranean geopolitics and indeed of the globe-spanning issues of the modern world. We thus take a final opportunity to highlight how we see Antikythera offering insights about wider cultural and historical processes.

To begin, it is worth placing Antikythera's proposed fragility as a locus of human activity in its wider Mediterranean context. How does Antikythera's history compare to other islands of comparable size and/or location in the rest of the Mediterranean? As we have suggested from the outset, islands that are big enough to have seen at least one or two substantial efforts at human colonisation, but small enough to have little or no land more than a couple of kilometres from the coast, are a particularly interesting category. They are fragile places, demographically, culturally and environmentally, and rather than see this as simply stemming from insular isolation, it is worth re-stressing how this fragility holds particularly true in the often highly interactive world of the Mediterranean.

GENERAL

It has been difficult to strike a balance in a book of this kind between discussions of the ways the data have been processed and analysed on the one hand and substantive questions about history and archaeology on the other. Ultimately we have favoured an approach in which we keep the former to a minimum in the main text, but instead make use of this appendix to lay out some methodological issues in greater detail. Even so, we continue trying to keep the use of equations and other symbolic notation to a minimum in the discussion that follows in the knowledge that those who wish for a full and formal treatment can and should follow up the referenced sources. The following sections are structured by the order in which various techniques arise in the main text.

CHAPTER 3

Erosion Models

In Plates 2a—b (as well as a follow-up in Plates 3la—b), we consider two kinds of meso-scale erosion model: RUSLE3D and USPED. Our input parameters for these models are provided in Table 3.1 and we do not think there is much further information that we can add here. For the general methods, please see Mitasova et al. 1996; Mitasova and Mitas 2001, and for a more detailed discussion of the Antikytheran example in relation to terracing, see Bevan and Conolly 2011.

This section provides a complete list of the locations defined as part of our survey work and discussed in the main text (Table AII.1). These locations can be loosely treated as ‘sites’ in the traditional sense of the term (i.e., a relatively spatially discrete cluster of artefacts representing the material remains of some past activity) with three important provisos. (1) Most locations were defined for the purposes of comparing different local assemblages, and via a spatial analytical model (see Appendix I for details) rather than by identification in the field (although we certainly did use informal assessments of such clusters in the field). At the risk of seeming to have left an interpretative task half-finished, we suggest that the exact way in which such locations should be compared with sites from other surveys is very much something upon which readers of this book should decide themselves based on their own analytical priorities. (2) The ‘Nominal Area’ of locations should not be used as a proxy for site extent and size (e.g., as an estimate of the exact edges and area of a Late Roman village) without careful thought. For example, in later periods, the nominal estimate often includes material in halo around settlements that is most likely attributable to rubbish disposal, garden plots and agricultural installations.