This conference brought together some 200 academics and administrators concerned with Mediterranean prehistory, history, and heritage. It was conceived and organized by Sophia Antoniadou, curator of the Pierides Museum, and Anthony Pace, superintendent of Cultural Heritage of Malta, who have also edited the proceedings, published in 2007. It was sponsored by the Pierides Foundation of Cyprus with the collaboration of the Foundation of the Hellenic Greek World, the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage of Malta, the Istituto per le Tecnologie Applicate ai Beni Culturali-Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche of Italy, and the Centre de Recherches en Arts, Images et Formes of the Université de Picardie Jules Verne of France; and support came from the Culture 2000 program of the European Union, the Greek Ministry of Education and Culture, and the Cyprus Tourism Organisation. Following an introductory lecture by Professor Harry Tzalas on Greek ships and seamanship, participants heard and discussed 40 papers by speakers from a dozen countries on topics ranging from pottery and mortuary practices to trade, shipping, identity, and heritage.

As befit the initiating stimulus from Malta and Cyprus, island-based perspectives gave fruitful insights throughout the proceedings. The keynote address by A. Bernard Knapp (University of Glasgow), “Island Archaeology and Island Identities in the Prehistoric Mediterranean,” stressed insularity not only as an isolating but also as a bridging force: the sea as a unifying realm facilitating the exchange of goods, ideas, and peoples since the dawn of prehistory. Indeed, as early as the middle of the 3rd millennium bc a so-called international spirit—a European community precursor—had come to dominate the Aegean Sea. The pervasive presence of Cycladic materials and forms, as shown by Yiannis Papadatos (Institute for Aegean Prehistory, Ierapetra, Crete), attested far-flung trade networks and sociocultural convergence. Papers by Susan Sherratt (Ashmolean Museum), Ina Berg (University of Manchester), and Jacqueline Balensi (Institut Fernand Courby, Université de Lyon) further revealed Mediterranean islands as foci of legendary events, interactions, or calamities.

The first day was engrossed by early prehistory, the second by textual and artifactual interpretations of classical and subsequent history. The third day's discussion shifted to recent and contemporary concerns with the conservation and management of Mediterranean heritage, embracing monumental, architectural, reliquary, artistic, and folkloristic components. Northern European and especially English obsession with Mediterranean scenery and remains from the nineteenth-century on, featuring Queen Victoria's many visits there, were provocatively illustrated by Christopher Chippindale (Cambridge University). The Maltese heritage, a five-millennial palimpsest ranging from underground megalithic structures to medieval catacombs, Arab and Crusader battlements, forts of the Knights of Malta, ramparts and dockyards of the British navy, sumptuous baroque and modern churches, and literary treasures of Malta's Italian- and English-inflected Arabic tongue, came alive in Anthony Pace's case study. Pace stressed the manifold conflicts, for Malta's residents and tourists alike, inherent in the conflicting claims of many legacies competing for attention and resources in these small and densely inhabited islands' cramped terrain. Robin Skeates (Durham University) showed how differences in Mediterranean museums reflected both disparate infrastructures and diverse views about what prehistory was and how best to display it. This writer addressed management problems in the heritage-rich Mediterranean, impoverished for millennia by conquest, colonization, rapine, looting, illicit excavation, and iconoclastic fury, and today beset more than ever by the global market, conflicting agendas of collectors, chauvinists, archaeologists, and archangelic international agencies. At once “the self-defining pride and the economic mainstay of its peoples, yet at the same time a crippling burden to protect and maintain, let alone to interpret and celebrate,” heritage plays a troubled and often paradoxical role in Mediterranean life.

The final paper by Greg Deftereos (La Trobe University), who sadly could not be present, addressed several of these issues in the context of complaints lodged with UNESCO by the Republic of Cyprus in August 2004 over excavations at Salamis conducted by the University of Ankara. “To whom does the cultural property of Cyprus belong? At what stage is an artefact the patrimony of a Turkish Cypriot, a Cypriot Turk, a Linobambaki (historical closet syncretists, professing to both Christianity and Islam), a Greek Cypriot, or humanity as a whole and who takes precedence?” As Deftereos noted, “Where culture and history are seen as metaphors for legitimacy and ownership,” cultural property issues can become crucial for an entire society.

That such issues can be effectively addressed seems a heartening prospect, given the expertise, panache, and dedicated concern of many articulate predoctoral candidates, whose participation was a notable feature of the gathering. It was hoped that future concerns would also address those realms, notably North Africa, the western Mediterranean, and Sicily, that were accorded less attention on this occasion than the eastern archipelago, celebrated in the Declaration of the Aegean at Lemnos, on September 17, 1994, as the “monument and symbol of universal civilization.”