50 cyprian broodbank
techniques allowed the extension of farming into the arid margins of the northern
Negev. Integration is the key concept, with these combined elements subtly attuned
to local landscapes, but also transferred across them, not least in the form of the
earliest custom-designed jars for oil transport.
The formative “long” third millenniumTempting as it is to speculate how these trajectories could have continued into various
hypothetical futures, they were in fact intercepted by a further suite of transforma-
tions during the later fourth and third millennia, thereby creating a fresh amalgam of
older ways of doing things and new dynamics that would shape the last 3000 years or
so of Mediterranean “prehistory,” and substantially determine how it emerged into
the later classical limelight. Four principal domains of change can be highlighted
within this time frame, which equates to an Early Bronze Age in the east, a Copper
Age in the west, and the latter followed by the former in the center. An obvious one
with which to begin is the environmental Mediterraneanization of the basin. This was
a gradual process embedded in a wider mid-Holocene drying phase across much of
Eurasia and Africa. As expected in a theater as complex as the Mediterranean, the pat-
terning was highly variegated in space and time, and remains uneven to this day, but
by the later third millennium the basic regime familiar from “historical” times had
consolidated. The consequences, of course, differed. Across northern Africa, save
along the ribbon-oasis of the Nile (to which we shall return), they entailed desertifica-
tion in the Sahara and the semi-isolation of Mediterranean Africans within a series of
“habitat islands” whose archaeological record goes peculiarly quiet for the next few
millennia. This creates an empirical and interpretive caesura that largely excludes the
African shore west of the Nile from the wider narratives that will start to unfold
around the rest of the basin. Elsewhere, however, environmental Mediterraneanization
implied a generalization of the ground-conditions of uncertainty, risk, challenge and
opportunity by now familiar as a key component (alongside fragmentation and
connectivity) in the world of The Corrupting Sea, but also regarded by many archae-
ologists as complicit in the rise of more exploitative social relations and thereby
aggrandizing individuals and groups.
In this respect, a second strand of change, among societies on the northern side of
the Mediterranean, stands out as particularly relevant. This involved the dissolution of
Neolithic village societies and their replacement by initially smaller, shorter-lived
communities, spread over a much larger proportion of the total landscape, including
uplands, small islands and other marginal zones, and tied together by fluid networks
of social relations reified in widespread styles of small, exchangeable prestige goods,
for instance metal jewelry, tools and weapons, as well as drinking cups for various
alcoholic drinks, including wine in the east. In tandem came a fresh assertiveness in
images of gender display on the part of the men who appear to have dominated such
mobile webs of contact, and a growing investment in burial monuments and mortuary
ritual, as other indices of a community’s sense of ancestral place became more fragile.
These extended, networked and socially reconfigured social landscapes, which can be
encountered in different forms from Iberia to Anatolia, grew out of multiple roots,
but were certainly finely attuned to the parallel environmental Mediterraneanization
of the basin. And it is therefore highly thought-provoking that by the third millennium