Eight thousand leagues of coastline and how many sites? A methodological insight into assessing shifting seashores, marine resources and socio-economic systems in prehistoric Mediterranean
Author(s): Tatiana Theodoropoulou
Year: 2025
Summary
This is an abstract from the "<html>Twenty Thousand Leagues (and Years!) under the Sea:<i> </i>Exploring the Place of Seashores in Prehistoric Socio-economic Systems</html>" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
The Mediterranean constitutes an ecological and cultural palimpsest, a region of intense millenia-long occupation as well as a precious archive of environmental changes and refugia-phenomena since the LGM. Although cultural sites from later periods are abundant and offer a rich dataset of coastal marine exploitation, the place of coastal environments and marine ecosystems in the socio-economic systems of prehistoric Mediterranean groups is less well documented. This is mainly due to the radical changes of the coastline since the end of the LGM, including submerged coasts or prehistoric sediments buried under alluvia, that literally erased signs of human occupation along the Mediterranean coast and hinder the mapping of coastal prehistoric sites. This inevitably creates a partial or skewed image of how coastal communities interacted with these environments, especially with respect to marine resources utilization, as many sites currently located at the coastal fringe actually lied at some distance away from the coast. This paper discusses the methodological problems encountered in this region and offers a synthesis of available geomorphological and zooarchaeological data collected during the ERC-funded program MERMAID.
Cite this Record
Eight thousand leagues of coastline and how many sites? A methodological insight into assessing shifting seashores, marine resources and socio-economic systems in prehistoric Mediterranean. Tatiana Theodoropoulou. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 509210)
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Abstract Id(s): 51316