Littoral Society and the Heterotopic Fabric of Early Medieval ports

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Mediterranean Archaeology: Connections, Interactions, Objects, and Theory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ports have long been recognized as nodes within grand skeins of connectivity, the thresholds over which goods and ideas move into a wider hinterland. But how, and to what extent, do ports function as their own world, and what can we say about littoral society and the contextual relationship of sea-adjacent peoples to their material culture? This paper builds off of Myrto Veikou's work to examine Early Islamic ports in the Eastern Mediterranean as Foucauldian 'heterotopias,' and the sea as a connective fabric that binds together an engagement with material culture qualitatively different from inland areas. Moving from the 7th to the 9th century the ways in which this fabric changes through, what Horden and Purcell have called the 'Early Medieval Depression,' will serve to highlight the 'otherness,' and continued connectivity, of peoples outside of shifting religious and political contexts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Mediterranean Archaeology: Connections, Interactions, Objects, and Theory

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 26289