A Little History of Mediterranean Island Prehistory

Abstract

Abstract Before the mid-1970s, a distinctive subi eld of Mediterranean island archaeology cannot be said to have existed; there were only archaeologies of individual islands or island groups. So far as the Mediterranean is concerned, an interest in studying islands in a collective and comparative framework, and trying to understand what impact the quality of insularity may have on material culture and human behaviors, can be traced directly to two inl uential articles by J.D. Evans in the 1970s . This chap-ter addresses the development of Mediterranean island pre-history from Childe to Evanss watershed papers, and charts the emergence of a comparative and explicitly quantitative island archaeology, heavily informed by biogeography, in the 1980s and 1990s. It then moves on to the critique of the new Mediterranean island archaeology that emerged in the early twenty-i rst century, and highlights how it has opened up new avenues of inquiry in insular prehistory, not least by empha-sizing connectivity, island identities, and the formation of dis-tinct island communities . Using data from the period between the later Upper Palaeolithic and the Late Bronze Age, it seeks to draw out the practical and heuristic consequences of dif er-ent paradigms, and to sug est future areas of development in Mediterranean island prehistory.

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