The Power of the Liminal: A Study of the Role of Harbours in Political Economies of the Bronze Age Aegean

The predominant settlement system in the Bronze Age Aegean, in which the palaces were located inland and controlled large agricultural catchments, paired with the fact that many of the resources, especially copper and tin, which these palaces relied on could only be obtained through maritime exchange, combined to create a problem of logistics. The palaces, it is assumed, would have needed to politically subordinate harbours to sustain the long-distance exchange that is viewed as undergirding the palatial economy. Despite the obviously crucial role played by harbours, their role in political economies has not yet been explicitly modelled. I argue that reconstructing political relationships through material culture requires a bottom-up, empirical, and holistic approach to the data.Through five diachronic case studies—Poros-Katsambas, Kommos, Chania, Tiryns, and Phylakopi—this thesis adopts a maritime cultural landscape approach and analyzes the natural, productive, and social landscape of harbours, by assembling and comparing multiple categories of data. First, I measure engagement with marine and terrestrial resources to understand how these sites engaged with their seascapes and perform catchment analyses to establish a basis for the territorial extent of the case study sites. As ecotones, harbours had access to a wide range of resources to produce surplus beyond palatial interests. I also quantify imported goods and evidence for metallurgical production and analyze the patterns in this data diachronically and at multiple geographic scales. While in specific historical circumstances the case study sites were tightly integrated into the palatial economy, they also frequently exploited non-palatial maritime networks and pursued their own economic interests over the longue durée. The maritime connectivity sustained by the case study sites brought them into contact with people, goods, and ideas from around the basin. I assess the extent to which harbours promoted or constrained the adoption of new technologies and ritual practices, and the role of liminal maritime agents in craft production and trade at these sites. The results of this study demonstrate a high degree of variability which calls into question the viability of harbour as an analytical category. To account for the degree of variability observed, I propose a provisional critical dual typology. The typology differentiates between sites that display features associated with urbanism and smaller-scale sites that interfaced with palatial polities in their hinterland. While the latter sites received economic investment from the palaces and became enmeshed in networks of production, exchange, and transshipment, the former sites acted as attractors which brought entrepreneurial agents from overseas to take advantage of the demand for high status goods generated by the elite. Overall, the range of political and economic relationships made evident by the rich data set will facilitate comparative analyses and allow these sites to be situated within broader discourses on globalization, urbanism, and climate resilience.

Department dc:contributor.department

Classics

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Fuller, Elliott

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Murray, Sarah C

• Aegean Prehistory
• Cultural Interaction
• Harbours
• Liminality
• Maritime Cultural Landscapes
• Political Economy

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/141065

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/141065