Globalisation in the Bronze Age?: In search of a Metaphor of Connectivity in the Central Mediterranean

Summary

The world in which native Sicilians and Sardinians exist in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC is an increasingly connected one. As we move beyond static, binary, and often uni-directional frameworks for assessing social and material change (e.g., ‘acculturation’), beyond the entrenched categories of 'Mycenaeans' or 'Cypriotes' vs 'natives', there is an opportunity to explore new analytical avenues to describe or explain the socio-cultural shifts that occur on these two islands. In this presentation I will propose that certain aspects of modern globalisation studies—recently applied to debates concerning Romanisation, Hellenisation, or Iron Age Orientalisation—may also work as an acceptable metaphor for the cross-cultural consumption of goods and ideas that we encounter as the Bronze Age winds to a close. Even without the hyper-connectivity or an existing single cultural framework that later periods can claim, examining modern globalisation ‘in action’ can inform us about material changes and social reconstructions at the beginning of the Mediterranean connectivity story.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Connectivities in Prehistoric and Classical West/Central Mediterranean

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14982