Major re-examination of issues of island identity and interaction with case studies from Crete, Cyprus and Sardinia covering a long time span and key cultural periods.
Water may separate islands and the mainland, but the sea also offers a vital link. This volume is one of three major outputs of the research and public engagement project ‘Being an Islander’: Art and Identity of the Large Mediterranean Islands, implemented between 2019 and 2024 at the University of Cambridge. This project aimed to elucidate what defines island identity in the Mediterranean. It explored how insularity affects and shapes cultural identity by integrating transdisciplinary research methodologies, for example, by producing an award-winning documentary on insularity and island identity, drawing on the principles of visual anthropology, social anthropology, and environment studies. This volume is the culmination of the project’s research strands, undertaken by our key research teams in Cambridge, Cyprus, Greece, and Italy. It disseminates our research across our main project themes: insularity, connectivity, mobility, migration, island art and material culture production, hybridity and diachronicity, and provides cross-disciplinary arguments and suggestions on the future of island archaeology and associated disciplines. Contributions included suggest that the relationship between people, place, and material culture is what reveals important aspects of island identity and reframes the concept of the islands as a dynamic interplay shaped by social and historical episodes, connectivity and mobility, rather than geography or political boundaries. The volume advocates that the complex histories of the Mediterranean islands can also be a story of connections.
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Summary
1. Understanding islands in the longue durée: Stories of insularity, community, and maritime heritage from the Mediterranean
Anastasia Christophilopoulou
2. Big and small islands: Rethinking insularity in the ancient Greek world
Christy Constantakopoulou
3. Roll up for the Mystery Tour: Islands of the transition and their contribution to ‘western’ civilisation
Louise A. Hitchcock, Laura Pisanu, and Aren M. Maeir
4. Contextualising Cypriot writing overseas: Cypro-Minoan and Cypro-Syllabic inscriptions found in Greece
Giorgos Bourogiannis
5. A Late Iron Age sword from Tamassos: Biography of an exceptional object
Susanna Pancaldo, Ema Baužytė, and Julie Dawson
6. Island metallurgy: A case study of two Early Bronze Age toggle pins from the Cypriot Collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum
Jana Mokrišová, Susanna Pancaldo, and Ema Baužytė
7. Insularity and Mediterranean networks in the collections of the National Museums of Cagliari from prehistory to the contemporary age
Francesco Muscolino
8. Being an Islander in the 3rd millennium BC Small Cyclades in the central Aegean: Connectivity, food networks, and sustainability of resources
Evi Margaritis, Michael J. Boyd, and Colin Renfrew
9. When our world became Christian: Crete and Cyprus during Late Antiquity
Salvatore Cosentino and Georgios Deligiannakis
10. Conclusions: Mediterranean rhapsody: Of island histories and identities
Helen Dawson
Index
Anastasia Christophilopoulou is the Senior Curator of the Ancient Mediterranean at the Fitzwilliam Museum, a member of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge and a member of the D Caucus (Art and Archaeology) Faculty of Classics, Cambridge, where she also completed her PhD thesis in 2007. She currently leads the Being an Islander project, and her research focuses on Mediterranean and island archaeology, and archaeology and public engagement. Anastasia co-directs the West Area of Samos Archaeological Project (WASAP).
