Why study daily life and local interaction in the ancient Mediterranean instead of international trade, monumental architecture, or elite political histories? Tartaron contends that local- and regional-scale investigations provide a necessary counterbalance to the long distance, intercultural focus of most prior research on interaction in the Mycenaean world, because local interactions were much more commonplace than far-reaching travel and trade. To this end, he utilizes two conceptual frameworks: the “coastscape,” the basic context of everyday life that encompassed both sea and land, and the “maritime small world,” a set of multiple coastscapes connected by geography, culture, and habit.

Tartaron pulls together disparate fragments of archaeological, textual, iconographic, environmental, ethnographic, and shipwreck evidence to construct a picture of local-scale maritime networks in the Bronze Age Aegean. Although much of the book relies on Annales-inspired historical approaches, Tartaron invests these with diachronic subtlety, observing that although local interactions may be long-lived, they are not necessarily unchanging or stable (e.g., 117). The first five chapters provide background information, including discussions of long-distance Mycenaean seafaring and trade, Bronze Age navigational technology, environmental factors in the Aegean over the longue durée, and a call to design research projects on Late Bronze Age coastlines and harbors using both archaeological and geophysical methodologies. Despite the book's ostensible local and regional focus, a fair amount of attention is given to non-local seafaring for which better evidence is preserved (e.g., discussions of the long-range Mycenaean galley [59–71], and the transmission of specialist seafaring knowledge [125–37]). The heart of the book, however, is chapters six and seven, where Tartaron outlines his conceptual framework of nested maritime cultural landscapes at multiple scales, and presents a series of three case studies to which this framework is directly applied, the most detailed of which involves the author's own fieldwork in the Saronic Gulf.

Some readers may be baffled by Tartaron's use of the concept “small worlds.” In network analysis, a small world refers specifically to a network topography in which a few individuals create bridging links between cliquish clusters. Following Broodbank and Horden and Purcell, Tartaron rather defines maritime small worlds as “communities bound together by intensive, habitual interactions due to geography, traditional kinship ties, or other factors” (190). While his discussion and definition of maritime small worlds is excellent and explicit, an alternative term (local worlds?) might have been preferable given the network theme of the book.

Maritime Networks does not just provide a useful model for Bronze Age specialists; it is also a contribution to scholars of maritime trade and economy, network and landscape approaches in archaeology, travel and mobility, the maintenance and transmission of traditional knowledge, and non-elite interaction. Tartaron presents a compelling argument for the study of daily life at local scales, not just for its own sake but also because of its relevance to larger dynamics of socio-political history.