The Black Sea as a Fluid Frontier: Connectivity, Integration, and Disarticulation from the Fourth to First Millennium BCE

Summary

Recent years have witnessed increasing scholarly attention to the Black Sea, a region often considered peripheral to better known "cores" of cultural activity, such as the Mediterranean, Europe, the Near East, and even the Caucasus. Challenging conventional views of the Black Sea as largely disarticulated prior to the arrival of Greek colonists in the 7th Century BCE, this paper argues that ongoing, informal networks of interaction existed across the region during the previous millennia, networks that both facilitated and challenged later colonial and imperial processes. Presenting a technological study of pottery from recent investigations at the Black Sea coastal site of Sinop, Turkey, and other Black Sea coastal contexts, this paper presents the argument that the appearance of shared traditions may both reflect and have served to reinforce an emergent ‘Black Sea’ identity at different phases in the region’s prehistory, suggesting that alternating cycles of integration and dis-integration waxed and waned across Black Sea networks of connectivity over the millennia. It is hypothesized that these phases occurred in response to broader interregional dynamics of connectivity between the Near East, southeast Europe, and the Mediterranean.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• The Interaction between Political and Ecological Frontiers

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17180