Maritime Narratives of Prehistoric Cyprus: Seafaring as Everyday Practice
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Maritime Narratives of Prehistoric Cyprus: Seafaring as Everyday Practice A. Bernard Knapp1 Accepted: 8 September 2020 / Published online: 16 October 2020 The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper considers the role of seafaring as an important aspect of everyday life in the communities of prehistoric Cyprus. The maritime capabilities developed by early seafarers enabled them to explore new lands and seas, tap new marine resources and make use of accessible coastal sites. Over the long term, the core activities of seafaring revolved around the exploitation of marine and coastal resources, the mobility of people and the transport and exchange of goods. On Cyprus, although we lack direct material evidence (e.g. shipwrecks, ship representations) before about 2000 BC, there is no question that beginning at least by the eleventh millennium Cal BC (Late Epipalaeolithic), early seafarers sailed between the nearby mainland and Cyprus, in all likelihood several times per year. In the long stretch of time—some 4000 years—between the Late Aceramic Neolithic and the onset of the Late Chalcolithic (ca. 6800–2700 Cal BC), most archaeologists passively accept the notion that the inhabitants of Cyprus turned their backs to the sea. In contrast, this study entertains the likelihood that Cyprus was never truly isolated from the sea, and considers maritime-related materials and practices during each era from the eleventh to the early second millennium Cal BC. In concluding, I present a broader picture of everything from rural anchorages to those invisible maritime behaviours that may help us better to understand seafaring as an everyday practice on Cyprus. Keywords Maritime practices Seafaring Maritimity Coastscapes Cyprus Prehistory
Introduction In different time periods and to varying extents, seafaring and the exploitation of marine and coastal resources formed key aspects of everyday life in the prehistoric communities of Cyprus. Of course, there may be a kernel of truth in James R.B. Stewart’s (1962:290) caustic comment: ‘The Cypriote has never been a great sea-farer … nor has he been a keen fisherman, until the coming of dynamite’. Over the past 60 years, however, our views about (and our interest in) seafaring and seafarers—about maritimity in general—have changed rather dramatically, and in this study I seek to present a ‘maritime narrative’ about prehistoric Cyprus, one represented mainly in the terrestrial archaeological record—the ‘quasi objects’ of a maritime cultural landscape (Tuddenham 2010:11). Like Westerdahl
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Journal of Maritime Archaeology (2020) 15:415–450
(2007:191), however, I eschew making a hard distinction between the maritime and the terrestrial because ‘The human perspective, after all, always consists of both sea and land’. This narrative involves very entangled histories, entangled not just in terms of archaeological discoveries themselves and the individual artefacts that result from fieldwork, but
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