The Making of the Middle Sea: How the Mediterranean came into being
By news editor, on 16 January 2012
Professor Andrew Reynolds, Professor of Medieval Archaeology, UCL Institute of Archaeology
Monday 9 January saw the opening event of the Institute of Archaeology’s 75th Anniversary programme with an engaging tour de force from Cyprian Broodbank, Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology, who delivered his inaugural lecture to a packed house.
An audience of almost 200 filled the Institute’s main lecture theatre to capacity – with standing room only – shortly before Cyprian’s lecture was introduced by Professor Stephen Shennan, Director of the Institute, with Professor Stephen Smith, UCL’s Dean of Social and Historical Sciences, in the Chair.
At the core of his lecture lay the notion that a focus on the Classical period in the Mediterranean region has obscured from view much earlier social and economic reactions to the ‘Middle Sea’.
Escaping the traditional bounds of period- and regionally-based archaeology, Cyprian drew widely on the archaeology of human societies from the later palaeolithic (later stone age) onwards, incorporating recent ethnographic material, and ranged in equal measure across this vast and varied cultural melting pot – a maritime region that links the Iberian peninsula, with its distinctive (but less well-known) prehistoric archaeology, in the west with the eastern Mediterranean and the so-called ‘cradle of civilisation’.