Presenting Counterpoints to the Dominant Terrestrial Narrative of European Prehistory

This book is the first in the multi-author series Maritime Encounters, outputs of the major six-year (2022–2028) international research initiative, funded by Sweden’s central bank. Our programme is based on a maritime perspective, a counterpoint to prevailing land-based vantages on Europe’s prehistory. In the Maritime Encounters project a highly international cross-disciplinary team has embarked on a diverse range of research goals to provide a more detailed and nuanced story of how prehistoric societies realised major and minor sea crossings, organised long-distance exchange, and adapted to ways of life by the sea in prehistory. Recent advances with ancient DNA have brought migration back into archaeological explanation, but little attention has been paid to maritime aspects of these movements or the maritime legacies inherited from indigenous cultures. The formation of the populations, cultures, and languages of Europe are now seen largely as consequences of three great prehistoric migrations: hunter-gatherers repopulating the post-glacial landscape, followed by farmers spreading from Anatolia, and then Indo-European-speaking pastoralists from the steppe. There is a significant gap in this current model that we sense most acutely in Scandinavia and the British Isles. Unanswered questions include: How these groups reached the islands and peninsulas of Atlantic Europe? What types of boats were used? How many people and animals could they carry? To what extent did indigenous coastal peoples contribute traditions and knowledge of boats, boat building, seaways, navigation, and subsistence in coastal environments? How was the long-distance trade in metals organised during the European Bronze Age? And what was the impact of this seacrossing network on the cultures, languages, and populations of the producers and consumers of bronze? Challenges the terrestrial focus of European prehistory, emphasizing the significance of seascapes, maritime networks, and coastal societies in shaping prehistoric Europe.

For many years now, the main thrust of European prehistory has followed a fundamentally terrestrial plot line. This terrestrial paradigm has undervalued the story of Europe as a peninsula between the Baltic, Mediterranean and Atlantic, and likewise downplayed that of many navigable rivers that reach deeply inland and the large lakes important for travel and subsistence. In vast areas of Europe the survival of incoming groups depended on coping and interacting with a seascape as much as a landscape. From the late Mesolithic onwards, in regions such as Scandinavia, the British Isles and the Mediterranean, most occupation was coastal; seas or rivers provided the most important infrastructure for transport, exchange and communication. Know-how about seascapes, boatbuilding, navigation and maritime networks had a profound impact on social organisation, ritual monuments and iconography, and the spread of materials and ideas, enabled by the adaptation of languages to these new environments. Given these facts the time is long overdue to critique the dominant terrestrial paradigm of European prehistory. This book is the first in the multi-author series Maritime Encounters, outputs of the major six-year (2022–2028) international research initiative funded by Sweden’s central bank. Our programme is based on a maritime perspective, a counterpoint to prevailing land-based vantages on Europe’s prehistory. In the Maritime Encounters project a highly international cross-disciplinary team has embarked on a diverse range of research goals to provide a more detailed and nuanced story of how prehistoric societies realised major and minor sea crossings, organised long-distance exchange, and adapted to ways of life by the sea in prehistory.

• | Author: Barry Cunliffe, Mikael Fauvelle, John T. Koch, Johan Ling
• | Publisher: Casemate Publishers
• | Publication Date: Mar 15, 2025
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Hardback
• | ISBN-13: 9798888571842
• | ISBN-10: 888857184Y