Mediterranean islands have long served as spaces of innovation in archaeology and material culture studies, often simultaneously considered isolated spaces of cultural development and highly connected nodes within broader exchange networks. Islands and communities asks how we might leverage the interdisciplinary study of material culture from islands to critically re-evaluate concepts of insularity, connectivity and mobility as experienced and expressed by islanders throughout the Mediterranean. These themes are woven throughout the 10 diverse and richly illustrated contributions that comprise this slim volume, focused primarily—although not exclusively—on the archaeology of Sardinia, Cyprus and Crete.
The volume’s Introduction by Anastasia Christophilopoulou (Chapter 1) and Conclusion by Helen Dawson (Chapter 10) offer broader reflections on the topic of Mediterranean island studies, while eight thematic chapters address different aspects of Mediterranean insularity through a particular material or literary corpus. While the chapters are not organised along methodological, regional or chronological lines, the structure of the volume encourages insight from the juxtaposition of individual case studies, even if the various contributions seldom engage with one another directly.
For example, three chapters interrogate definitions of insularity and the identity of island communities in different ways. Christy Constantakopoulou (Chapter 2) reassesses the place of islands in the Classical Greek imagination through a close reading of fifth- and fourth-century-BC Athenian literature. Authors such as Thucydides cultivated a clear distinction between larger (i.e. Sicily) and smaller (i.e. Cycladic) islands, developing narratives of insularity and dependence that they apply only to the latter group. Constantakopoulou argues that these perspectives played a foundational role in broader political phenomena, including rationalising Athenian expansion throughout the Aegean after the Persian Wars. This etic perspective toward insularity raises questions about how the premodern inhabitants of islands, large and small, would have understood their own place within the wider Mediterranean world. Giorgos Bourogiannis (Chapter 4) and Francesco Muscolino (Chapter 7) offer interesting insight into this question—exploring the identity of island communities as manifested through material culture at two very different scales. The former presents a small corpus of objects with Cypro-Minoan and Cypriot Syllabic texts found in Greece, arguing for the durable presence of Cypriot communities and the manifestation of island identities at the sites where these objects were found. The latter reviews the diachronic collections from the National Museums of Cagliari, Sardinia, highlighting how recurrent themes such as exile, foreign control and long-distance trade played an important role in the development of local identities on the island.
Building on these themes of local identities and expanding into cultural resilience, two contributions bring together the archaeological and historical records from multiple islands to examine how island communities responded to wider regional phenomena. Louise Hitchcock et al. (Chapter 3) review the archaeology of Nuraghic Sardinia, Palatial Crete and Late Bronze Age Cyprus, demonstrating that periods of societal or demographic transition were key to the development and redefinition of local identities at different times. By contrast, Salvatore Cosentino and Georgios Deligiannakis (Chapter 9) present a whirlwind tour of the archaeological and epigraphic records of Late Antique Cyprus and Crete, illustrating how communities on these two islands responded to political reorganisation, religious change and instability in the Eastern Mediterranean between the fourth and seventh centuries AD.
A substantial report on the recent Keros Project and its various subsidiary field projects by Evi Margaritis et al. (Chapter 8) shifts the focus from the largest Mediterranean islands to some of the smallest, offering key perspectives on how islands of all different sizes have insight to offer for our understanding of insularity, connectivity and mobility. The authors review the results of excavations on the Cycladic islands of Keros and nearby Dhaskalio, juxtaposing this unique architectural and material assemblage against the more canonical picture of settlement in the Cyclades during the third millennium BC. Drawing on rich geoarchaeological, archaeobotanical and bioarchaeological data, the authors argue that human activity on Keros and Dhaskalio required a dense network of interaction between Cycladic and mainland communities. This hypothesis is substantiated by the results of regional surveys of south-east Naxos, Keros and several neighbouring islands, which Margaritis and colleagues leverage to place evidence for the Early Bronze Age occupation and abandonment of these landscapes within in a broader diachronic regional settlement pattern.
This wide range of approaches for studying premodern insularity reflects the fact that Islands and communities is the product of a large interdisciplinary research project that also included a feature-length documentary film (Being an Islander 2023 accessible under: https://vimeo.com/876710685?share=copy) and exhibition at Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam Museum (Islanders: the making of the Mediterranean, February–June 2023). In the book’s Introduction, Christophilopoulou reflects on how these initiatives worked collectively to explore diachronic conceptions of insularity and island identity. The documentary, directed by Demetrios Bouras and produced by Christophilopoulou, presents one contemporary conception of insular identity, as reflected through tangible and intangible cultural heritage on the Cycladic island of Sifnos. Likewise, the exhibition—which displayed a combination of Cypriot, Sardinian and Cretan objects from the Fitzwilliam’s collection alongside important international loans—was developed alongside a series of seminars, performances and accessibility-focused events that encouraged engagement and garnered insight from the wider public. The curation of this exhibition also facilitated the conservation and study of some 30 Cypriot metal objects from the Fitzwilliam’s collection, with two representative case studies presented in Islands and communities (Pancaldo et al., Chapter 5; Mokrišová et al., Chapter 6) that highlight the networks of material and technological exchange that have characterised island life over time.
Whether considering contemporary island communities from Sifnos to Sardinia or the early settlement of Mediterranean islands large and small, Islands and communities emphasises how themes such as insularity, connectivity and mobility are anything but monolithic. Instead, these concepts may have seasonal variation or a complicated coexistence, calling into question our definition of such terms and their utility for understanding island communities. The contradictions and subtleties that have defined ancient and modern life on Mediterranean islands present a scholarly challenge, which is embraced through the varied approaches in this volume. While no single case study will satisfy every reader, the variety of topics, methods and insights in Islands and communities brings to light the vibrancy of Mediterranean island archaeology and invites ongoing creativity and critical inquiry within the field.
