'From luxuries to anxieties': a liminal view of the Late Bronze Age world-system

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InterweavIng worldssystemic Interactions in eurasia, 7th to 1st Millennia BC

Papers from a conference in memory of Professor Andrew Sherratt

what Would a Bronze age world system look like? world systems approaches to europe and western asia 4th to 1st millennia BC

EditorsToby C. Wilkinson, Susan Sherratt and John Bennet

© OXBOW BOOKS 2011ISBN 978-1-84217-998-7

Contents

Contributors v

1. Introduction 1 Susan Sherratt2. global development 4 †Andrew Sherratt

a. the warp: global systems and Interactions3. evolutions and temporal delimitations of Bronze age world-systems in western asia and the Mediterranean 7 Philippe Beaujard4. the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of andrew sherratt 27 Cyprian Broodbank5. Ingestion and Food technologies: Maintaining differences over the long-term in west, south and east asia 37 Dorian Q Fuller and Michael Rowlands6. Revolutionary Secondary Products: the Development and Significance of Milking, animal-traction and wool-gathering in later Prehistoric europe and the near east 61 Paul Halstead and Valasia Isaakidou7. world-systems and Modelling Macro-Historical Processes in later Prehistory: an examination of old and a search for new Perspectives 77 Philip L. Kohl8. ‘From luxuries to anxieties’: a liminal view of the late Bronze age world-system 87 Christopher M. Monroe9. re-integrating ‘diffusion’: the spread of Innovations among the neolithic and Bronze age societies of europe and the near east 100 Lorenz Rahmstorf10. what might the Bronze age world-system look like? 120 David A. Warburton11. ‘Archival’ and ‘Sacrificial’ Economies in Bronze Age Eurasia: an Interactionist Approach 135 to the Hoarding of Metals David Wengrow

vContents

B. the weft: the local and the global

12. the Formation of economic systems and social Institutions during the Fifth and Fourth Millennia BC in the southern levant 145 Nils Anfinset13. negotiating Metal and the Metal Form in the royal tombs of alacahöyük in north-Central anatolia 158 Christoph Bachhuber

14. the near east, europe, and the ‘routes’ of Community in the early Bronze age Black sea 175 Alexander A. Bauer15. Between assyria and the Mediterranean world: the Prosperity of Judah and Philistia in the seventh Century BCe in Context 189 Avraham Faust and Ehud Weiss16. northeast africa and the levant in Connection: a world-systems Perspective on Interregional relationships in the early second Millennium BC 205 Roxana Flammini17. strands of Connectivity: assessing the evidence for long distance exchange of silk in later Prehistoric eurasia 218 Irene Good18. travelling in (world) time: transformation, Commoditization, and the Beginnings of Urbanism in the southern levant 231 Raphael Greenberg19. Bridging India and scandinavia: Institutional transmission and elite Conquest during the Bronze age 243 Kristian Kristiansen20. new Kid on the Block: the nature of the First systemic Contacts between Crete and the eastern Mediterranean around 2000 BC 266 Borja Legarra Herrero21. lost in translation: the emergence of Mycenaean Culture as a Phenomenon of glocalization 282 Joseph Maran22. anticipating the silk road: some thoughts on the wool–Murex Connection in tyre 295 Jane Schneider23. Unbounded structures, Cultural Permeabilities and the Calyx of Change: Mesopotamia and its world 303 Norman Yoffee

Nils AnfinsetUniversity of Bergen

Alexander A. BauerCity University of new York

Christoph BachhuberBritish Institute at ankara

Philippe BeaujardCnrs

John BennetUniversity of Sheffield

Cyprian BroodbankUniversity College london

Avraham FaustBar-Ilan University

Roxanna FlamminiPontifical Catholic University of ArgentinaConICet

Dorian Q FullerUniversity College london

Irene GoodHarvard University

Raphael Greenbergtel aviv University

Paul HalsteadUniversity of Sheffield

Valasia IsaakidouUniversity of Sheffield

Philip L. Kohlwellesley College

Kristian KristiansenUniversity of gothenburg

Borja Legarra HerreroUniversity of leicester

Joseph MaranUniversity of Heidelberg

Christopher M. MonroeCornell University

Lorenz RahmstorfUniversity of Mainz

Michael RowlandsUniversity College london

Jane SchneiderCity University of new York

Susan SherrattUniversity of Sheffield

David A. WarburtonUniversity of lyon

Ehud WeissBar-Ilan University

David WengrowUniversity College london

Toby C. WilkinsonUniversity of Sheffield

Norman YoffeeUniversity of nevada

ContrIBUtors

Archaeologist, Teacher, Friend.Professor Andrew G. Sherratt, 1946–2006.

8.

‘From Luxuries to Anxieties’: a Liminal View of the Late Bronze Age World-System

Christopher M. Monroe

In order to understand how past worlds were interwoven, what ancient world-systems looked like, or how ancient intersocietal networks formed and operated, perceptions of the sea are crucial, at least if one is concerned with regions incorporating the Mediterranean. World-systems (or core-periphery modelling) is just one of the more tractable models archaeologists and historians have employed to better explain change in and around the ancient Mediterranean. Various applications of world-systems thinking have been critiqued as oversimplifying, deterministic, anachronistic, or overly structural, among other quarrels neatly summarized by McGuire (2000) and Stein (1999). There is no denying that scholars have often found world-systems too problematic to be worth the trouble, though this view seldom acknowledges how the paradigm has evolved away from the dualistic model of modernity that Wallerstein envisioned in 1974. This paper argues that world-systems perspectives remain useful, especially as applied to maritime contexts and more still if hitherto ignored liminal aspects of intersocietal networks are considered. After explaining what a liminal perspective might look like, these ideas are applied to the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean ‘world’ of the Uluburun mariners.

Liminality as a fl uid perspectiveAn identifi able set of transformative, historically signifi cant processes is captured by the phenomenon known as liminality when it is applied on an intersocietal scale. I would not argue that these processes are peculiar to maritime contexts, though they seem pronounced there and thus offer fruitful analytical opportunities for nautical archaeologists and maritime historians. As a theoretical construct, liminality is a century old, ethnographically derived theory of ritual and social space (van Gennep 1960 [1908]). Conceptually and etymologically tied to thresholds, ports and passage, it was not conceived to study maritime peoples. Its Greek derivation from λιμήν (‘port, harbour’) implies obvious, yet unexplored, maritime connections that are drawn here to the semi-peripheries of a particular world-system wherein polities engaging with Levantine traders and other liminal experts were transformed in ways analogous to rites of passage. Like the rituals attending birth, adulthood and death performed in liminal space, state emergence, complexity and collapse were often catalysed by uncontrolled infl uences that came with the waves. The sea and its harbours, and the ships and mariners that crossed it, formed a myriad of spaces between

The Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean world included many land-water interfaces one may conceptualize as thresholds. These transformative spaces presented economic and ideological opportunities, risks, and unknowns that cohere from a liminal theoretical perspective. Traditional attitudes toward maritime groups helped create socially acceptable frameworks of action wherein liminal experts like maritime traders were allowed to conduct potentially destabilizing business and thus infl uence history. The Uluburun shipwreck is discussed as a liminal phenomenon whose understanding requires both a world-systems perspective and an appreciation for certain ritual, social and intersocietal dynamics created by living on or near the sea.

Christopher M. Monroe88

heres and theres, a fl uid locus where autonomy, power and risk co-mingled and created an historical matrix in which great transformations were catalysed or made more likely.

How such an ambiguous notion might fi t within the structures associated with centre-periphery and world-systems thinking is not readily apparent. Liminality has usually been applied to single societies, not a group of inter-related societies as is suggested here. For reasons explained below, Turner (1969, 128–30) argued that no society could function without the tension between structure and anti-structure, much of which took place within a liminal temporal-spatial locus. One may then hypothesize that if a world-system (or intersocietal network) is a true social system, then it should manifest this same process. While there is not a direct correspondence between structures posited in world-systems models (minimally featuring core, semi-periphery, and periphery) and those in liminality (separation, transition, and incorporation), both can be understood as tripartite metaphors each containing a transformative middle characterised by autonomy, ambiguity, power, and risk.1 Both associate innovation and liberality with the interstitial zone – that noted ‘seedbed of change’ Braudel well described (1982, 25; 1984, 30) – and suggest history may bend to actors thriving outside and between boundaries. What liminality adds to the more conventional and economic readings of history are cognitive factors that often multiply the effects produced by motives linked to raw material and Realpolitik.

World-systems are characterised by interregional divisions of labour and expanding markets wherein the maritime plays a potent role, essentially by reducing transport costs. Harbours and sea-lanes function as semi-peripheries between consuming cores and producing peripheries or as bridges between core polities. Underlying these putative structures are profi t-seeking and similarly maximizing rationalities. These behaviours are often held to be anachronistic in the context of Bronze Age societies wherein brotherly gift exchanges, as found in the Amarna Letters (Moran 1992; Cohen and Westbrook 2000) and the ‘tournaments of value’ (Appadurai 1986, 21) therein, are thought to be more the rule. However valid the critique of rational economic motives in the remote past may be, adopting a liminal perspective could lead toward better understanding of the cognitive conditions of people whose economic motives and incentives will continue to be debated. We can posit, for example, that certain anxieties inherent to operating within liminal spaces or dealing with liminal agents shaped socioeconomic relations as signifi cantly as more rational sorts of action.

How can this be demonstrated with the evidence at hand? Textual documentation of maritime matters in general is meagre, and one cannot expect a Bronze Age treatise on relations between the harbour and capital or hinterland. One may note, however, a few references wherein the fear

of liminal agency is expressed in terms familiar from later periods, wherein seagoing folk and especially maritime merchants are held in suspicion. Papyrus Lansing from Dynasty 20 notes that “ships’ crews of every (commercial) house have received their load(s) so that they may depart from Egypt to Djahy. Each man’s god is with him. Not one of them (dares) say: ‘We shall see Egypt again’” (Lichtheim 2006, 107). The Ramesside Instructions of Amenemope advise, “Do not set your heart on wealth” (ibid., 152) and strikes a chord similar to Sophocles’ dramatic claim that money “teaches and perverts the useful minds of men so that they take up disgraceful endeavours” (Antigone 295–98). Various Homeric descriptions of Phoenicians, those “famed for ships, greedy men” (Odyssey 15, 415–6), express a dubious view of maritime commerce that can be explained as part of a process of Greek self-defi nition as markedly distinct from a Phoenician Other (E. S. Sherratt 2005, 36–8), or more specifi cally of the Other that takes place when Greece and Persia become politically opposed (Malkin 1998, 17).

Mariners, maritime merchants, and traders generally tend to attract the sort of judgements just listed in all periods of history. They have much in common with, and some are indeed, middleman and minority groups who share in the social risks and benefi ts described in Evers (1994) and Zenner (1991). Moreover these groups all inhabit to some degree the social and geographical spaces that can be characterized as semi-peripheral in world-systems constructions, or as liminal in terms to be discussed further below. The elemental physical threats posed by a chaotic sea add a particular dimension with which I am concerned here, one that sets hydroliminal phenomena apart as a topic maritime archaeology might be uniquely well equipped to investigate.

Without rehearsing the history of breathtaking underwater excavations in the Mediterranean, one can charge that maritime archaeology has looked mostly at the trees rather than the forest. Gibbins and Adams (2001) note how in the Mediterranean an historical-particularist school has prevailed, though not without laudable successes in mapping out shipbuilding technology (Steffy 1994; Hocker and Ward 2000). Flatman (2003) voiced a crescendo in this debate by citing individual theoretical contributions as exceptions within an overall inadequately developed discussion. Westerdahl’s (2005) application of liminality to ancient Scandinavia stands out for its attempt to map the more cognitive and ritual aspects of the seafarer’s landscape. By demonstrating below how liminality might broaden our understanding of a Late Bronze Age (henceforth LBA) shipwreck and its intersocietal milieu, I hope to also show how Westerdahl’s impetus adds needed complexity and fl uidity to archaeological theory and world-systems modelling.

Liminality is hardly a well-worn analytical tool, and for clarity its pertinent tenets are outlined here. It was largely

8. ‘From Luxuries to Anxieties’: A Liminal View of the Late Bronze Age World-System 89

ignored for over fi fty years despite the elegance of van Gennep’s Rites of Passage (1960 [1908]) and its tripartite pattern or schema within rites described as separation, transition, and incorporation, or pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal ontological states. For van Gennep social rites functioned to lessen the disturbance done by the constant passage of individuals through sacred and profane space. The liminal or transitional phase creates a setting where signifi cant passages (including birth, maturity, marriage, journeys and death) can be navigated while minimizing external disturbance. Two characteristics of liminality create a nexus for suspicion: greater autonomy and increased power, often manifest as special skills, secret knowledge, magic, even super-human abilities.

Before van Gennep’s tripartite scheme gained wide currency, anthropologist Victor Turner improved upon it. Dissatisfi ed with a contemporary preoccupation with structure, what he called the “patterned arrangements of role-sets, status-sets, and status-sequences consciously recognised and regularly operative in a given society” (Turner 1974, 236–37), he focused on dynamics transcending these categories, specifi cally what he called anti-structure, which included any group or communitas that coalesced “over and above any formal social bonds” (ibid., 45) and furthermore, were often associated with “spontaneity and freedom”, as opposed to “obligation, jurality, law, constraint, and so on” (ibid., 49). Turner’s anti-structure and communitas groups included Ndembu tribal members, Medieval knights, various holy men, and other outsiders including his contemporary Haight-Ashbury hippies. Rather than a set of co-functioning structures, society to Turner was a process, a constant dialectic not only between dominant institutions, as van Gennep’s contemporary, Max Weber believed, but between structure and anti-structure, the latter pervading wherever the former left a void. As noted by Defl em (1991, 13–15), ritual thus conceptualized gains historicity by identifying an internal mechanism for social resistance, change, even revolution. Turner saw liminality in the rituals and cultural performance of complex societies also, and claimed anti-structure was so essential that “no society can function adequately” without it (Turner 1969, 128–30).

Turner’s categorical statement is vividly illustrated in Peter Weir’s (1998) widely released fi lm, The Truman Show. Weir portrays a man-made insular world devoid of thresholds. Chaos only glimmers at the margins, where an artifi cial sea bounds the hero within a perfected world. As a materially fulfi lled adult, Truman grows increasingly disturbed by structured-ness but is psychosomatically incapable of crossing an open bridge into the real world. Weir’s sea plays a dual role by providing Truman the means of escape. Piloting a small yacht toward the edge of the ersatz cosmos, he survives an attempted annihilation by storm and reaggregates himself by

exiting the stage (forcing the end of the Show) and choosing a disorderly but real life. Weir’s rites of passage include the symbolic-ritual killing of the passenger and a clever inversion of the Homeric pattern of Odysseus moving from chaos abroad to order at home. Truman (i.e. ‘true man’) is thus an anti-hero, annihilator of a dysfunctional cosmos whose creator is a television director arrogating roles of Apollo and Poseidon. Weir’s fi lm illustrates the persistence and universality of Turner’s ritual process and how its patterns are continually adapted as vehicles for culturally-specifi c meditations, in this case privacy, narcissism and television’s colossal role in contemporary culture. As noted by Eliade and others (1996 [1958], 135–38, 188ff.; Mills 2002, 3–6), the ability of such mythic patterns to address universal problems explains both their persistence and transcultural movement. Such problems and responses should be instrumental within paradigms of intersocietal action, especially when applied to more socially embedded economic modes of antiquity.

Weir’s anti-heroic tale captures the duality of destructive vs. creative power, autonomy, and fear of watery annihilation that inhabits many artistic works. Bachelard plumbed the psycho-dramatic aspects of this trope in Water and Dreams (Bachelard 1999 [1949]), and reduced its myriad manifestations to an ‘Ophelia complex’ and ‘Charon complex’. Regarding the latter, i.e. the myth of the ferryman, he summarized it as “a legend in a thousand forms endlessly renewed in folklore” (ibid., 76), expressing terror of “total death, …a death with no turning back” (ibid., 74–5) where proper burial is impossible and connections to land, family and god are obliterated. A sympathetic view of the sea, then, must gaze upon a pool of angry disembodied spirits, threatening the living and adding to the sea’s already chaotic, inscrutable visage. The impact on the psyche Bachelard captured in describing the early sailor as “the fi rst living man who was as courageous as a dead one” (ibid., 74). This terror and courage must have affected the constituency of maritime communities as well as the attitudes about them held by terrestrial neighbours. As Broodbank (2006) shows, the earliest Mediterranean crossings were accomplished in paddled dugouts around 10,000 BCE. Recognizing that it took another 8000 years for sails to appear in Mediterranean evidence (McGrail 2001, 112), one has perhaps a rough measure of the anxieties inherent to maritime life.

Turner located his liminal process in communitas, a situation wherein ‘passengers’ are ritually degraded en route to reaggregation and new social status. In the liminal state, the passenger is seen as ambiguous, polluting, and dangerous (Turner 1969, 94, 108–11), adjectives often applied to the sailor (e.g., Sindbad as carnal, bad) or the sea (e.g., Horden and Purcell 2000). Passengers often endure humiliations and curses intended to root out meanness, greed, and other anti-social characteristics. But liminal suffering paradoxically


becomes a source of power and opportunity (Turner 1969, 100), and, as van Gennep also observed, it offers escape from the restraints of social structure. Bonding with other passengers also creates the potential for alliances outside social structures, i.e. the communitas that is identifi ed with anti-structure. To simplify Turner with materialistic terms, structure is concrete, while communitas is fl uid.

This fluidity applies especially to status and class. Despite liminality’s ostensible escapism, passengers usually reaggregate at a higher status. In this case the ritual degradations and/or elevations that temporarily distort the social hierarchy serve as reminders of the structure being played with – learning by disassembly and reassembly. A common dialectic is the low seeking the high, and vice versa. Turner (1969, 97) mentioned Prince Philip sending his son to the Australian wilderness as a typical example of elite identifi cation with communitas for the sake of legitimating a lofty status.

Turner’s interests transcended tribal society, and he hoped his ritual process would apply widely, to “law, politics, and economic behaviour which have hitherto eluded the structuralist conceptual net” (1974, 269–70). Yet Turner and van Gennep are underused and often misunderstood (Alexander 1991). Kimball’s introduction to the belated English translation of Rites of Passage expressed surprise that van Gennep’s tripartite scheme had not been adopted for explaining change (van Gennep 1960, x); only recently has archaeology begun to tap this potential (Westerdahl 2005; Tappy 2008). Turner’s emphasis on dialectical social process is still a hidden passageway to the semi-peripheral, liminal zones, where maritime peoples made their livings and lost their ships.

How Turner’s process might apply to contexts stretching beyond a single society is suggested by a further consideration of some transformative dynamics that take place at meeting points between societies – often in harbours and at the water’s edge, that is, what constitutes the liminal by etymological defi nition. Wherever society meets shoreline a threshold is made to convey people, goods and especially ideas. In his analysis of ancient maritime Scandinavia, Westerdahl (2005, 3) sees the shore as a geographic point of contention, a land-sea duality, refl ecting order and chaos, where a ship acts as a ‘mobile bridge’ imposing temporary order on chaos and thus becoming a ‘liminal agent’. Besides the insight into the personifi cation of boats this idea conveys, the boat becomes an adaptive mechanism that helps the seafarer confront anxieties about the chaotic sea. That it was employed ritualistically Westerdahl shows by some fascinating examples where the social order is inverted at sea: terrestrial taboos become normative at sea, magical inversions of nature are practised on board, and glyptic renderings of animals show a ritualised and magical intention that, as Turner would agree, lends

welcome coherence to the fl uid, ambiguous conditions of the seafarer.

It is important not to mistake this odd land-sea contention of Westerdahl’s as peculiar to Northern European shores. Like some early work of Eliade (1996 [1958]; 1987 [1959]), Mills (2002) sees confrontation of watery chaos as a universal pattern and suggests that entire peoples can be viewed as liminal agents, facing challenges from chaotic corners and creating similar disturbances in the status quo. Gilgamesh, Enkidu and Humbaba in the Gilgamesh Epic, Achilles facing the Scamandros river-god, Odysseus facing Poseidon, Jacob challenging the Jabbok river, and various aspects of the Exodus story all conform to Mills’ ‘mythologem’ of the liminal hero. Mills brings the discussion of these paradoxical fi gures down to earth by comparing their behaviour to that of modern war veterans and their experience of post-traumatic stress. Both his mythical and actual heroes face chaos in liminal spaces armed with special powers; each also wrestles with reaggregation. These same problems recur throughout the Sagas, whose heroes “all occupy a liminal space that is barely on one side or the other of what normal Icelandic society can tolerate” (Kellogg 2000, liii). David Guterson elegantly encapsulates a more everyday heroic confrontation in his novel about modern maritime life and justice on Puget Sound, Snow Falling on Cedars (Guterson 1994, 39): “Only insofar as he struggled successfully with the sea could a man lay claim to his place in things.” Lest the point of invoking this heroic pattern be misconstrued as a call to construct another ‘history by the victors’, one should notice in any specifi c case how the heroic pattern is applied to suit specifi c agendas, whether mythical, political or historiographical. The Phoenicians, for example, are easily cast as hydroliminal heroes surviving the chaos at the end of the Late Bronze Age through their maritime skill and position. The Sea Peoples (Redford 1992, 241–56; Ward and Joukowsky 1992; Oren 2000), by direct contrast, could be seen as the anti-heroes of the LBA, aiming their maritime communitas or ‘conspiracy in the islands’ at the dominant structures of the age.

Such heroic patterns may help contextualize the role of sea traders, but I doubt whether a model for Bronze Age trade predicated on this or liminal theory alone would be either useful or easily applied. Detecting liminal phenomena is subjective and minimally a two-step process predicated on some agreement with Eliade regarding symbolism and universality, and with Ricoeur, that ritual actions are grounded in myth, and that we can learn from the “original enigma of the symbols” (Ricoeur 1967, 349–50). One must identify thresholds as interstitial maritime spaces and groups separated by social action, whether legal, linguistic, political or cultic. Separation, if not explicit in text or artefact, may be revealed in evidence of uneven property rights that divide agriculturalists from those working the sea (which unlike


land is beyond ownership or control).2 Above all, what promises to be analytically signifi cant are thresholds that are not simply physical but transformative; to be liminal as understood here they must facilitate intersocietal exchanges between otherwise disparate social groups.

This is hardly a model or theoretical construct on the order of world-systems or similar theories. It has more potential as a module, functioning within broader paradigms. As such I see hydroliminality illuminating maritime history and connectivity in the Mediterranean and other problematic ‘worlds’3 in at least three dimensions. First, the anxieties and responses of all participants in intersocietal networks should be incorporated. Evidence for perceived chaos, the heroic challenge to it, and the anxiety attending both the hero and the chaos can be collected both textually and archaeologically, as illustrated briefl y below. Second, compiling literary narratives and historical outcomes would highlight the conspicuous role in social transformations hydroliminal groups have had throughout history. Working towards such a compendium may yield interesting patterns for comparative research.4 Anthropological studies of ancient and recent trading groups and entrepreneurial minorities (Curtin 1984; Evers 1994) have already shown how social distance was kept between the rare entrepreneur and more typical socioeconomic actors and authorities. Third, an approach to shipwrecks as relics of liminal agency, objects lost in fl uid space whose material evades received analytical structures, might lead one to humbly argue for Turner that these ‘sunken time capsules’ yield striking examples of communitas. Such a module might suit maritime archaeology’s aim of understanding human interactions with bodies of water. It would fi t particularly well into Flatman’s (2003, 151) outline for research into “perspectives upon the seascape”, “the nature of shipboard societies and their relationships to ‘mainstream’ society”, and other goals.

The Uluburun shipwreck: capsule of communitas in a Late Bronze ‘world’In the late 14th century BC a crew of three or four anonymous Syrian or Cypriot merchants, and perhaps some Mycenaeans, were transporting ten tons of copper, a ton of tin, a ton of raw glass, raw resin, a load of fi ne Cypriot ceramics, ivory, ebony, and other treasures to destination(s) unknown in the Aegean (Pulak 2008; 2005; 1998). Aspects of this interpretation have been contested of late (Cline 2007; Bachhuber 2006; Bloedow 2005), with the ethnicity of the sailors, and ports of origin and destination all seemingly unknowable or brimming with problematical assumptions. Can anything concrete be learned from a Bronze Age shipwreck when even the simplest questions regarding identity and community present such

intractables? Where does Uluburun belong, that is, where does it fi t within the socioeconomic structures and/or relations of its temporal-spatial world? If the Uluburun wreck is a time capsule, one must admit it is also a puzzle concerning the organization of trade in the LBA world and its web of communities.

Little has helped piece together this puzzle more than Andrew and Susan Sherratt’s 1991 article, ‘From Luxuries to Commodities: the Nature of Bronze Age Trading Systems’ (henceforth Luxuries). This seminal study cleared a path through two centuries of substantivist-formalist debate, re-tracing steps from the capitalism-as-nature axioms of Adam Smith to the capitalism-as-corruption manifesto of Marx; onward to Weber’s economy-as-agrarian-household; thence to Polanyi’s marketless primitivism (promulgated by Moses Finley); and eventually into the processual-scientifi c and post-processual/ideological schools of archaeological thought. Incredibly, the Sherratts described a model which appeared to resolve many of these tensions, and for an extremely complex region during a two thousand year span to boot. Their preamble alone was uncommonly useful and a relief from what has often been observed as a tiresome, even “sterile” (Van de Mieroop 2007, 189), debate.5

According to the Sherratts, attractive luxury goods were used to open relations with new partners whose own economies developed apace to supply commodities for expanding trade networks. Unlike most prior conceptions, royal gift exchange and profi t-driven entrepreneurialism were seen to operate simultaneously and sometimes in concert. In this and other ways the Sherratts’ model neatly combined two competing agendas they termed the ‘agrarian’ (mostly Weber’s legacy) and ‘conspicuous consumption’ (after Sombart, Veblen, and later anthropologists concerned with demand-side economics). Luxuries also avoided relying on problematic structures implied in world-systems theory. Their interregional system behaved unlike Wallerstein’s (1974) European world-system in that it was driven more by demand for luxury goods than supply of bulk commodities. It also allowed for a ‘contagious process’ (i.e., diffusion) and local agency, thus cooling another aged debate over the putative Near Eastern roots of Aegean complexity. Merchant-handled bullion injected fl uidity and mobility into the system, but local economies were penetrated from ‘the top down’, owing much to the attractiveness of luxuries produced by royally attached specialists, as opposed to everyday products.

In the 1400–1200 BC time frame, what the Sherratts call ‘inter-regnal’ trade was dominated by key investors and players such as those monumentalized in the 14th century Amarna Letters. Textual evidence from Ugarit and Assyria balances the Amarna view by showing both the looming role of royal capital and the signifi cant input of non-royal merchant families who conducted trade with and without the


crown (Faist 2001; Monroe 2009a). Though world-systems structures were not explicitly posited in Luxuries, the Sherratts nevertheless write of peripheries gradually absorbed (as commodities were produced for the interregional market) into a single system that collapsed as one faulty tower soon after 1200 BC.

Andrew Sherratt (1994; 1993) elsewhere employed structures of cores and peripheries in Braudelian fashion to relate Europe’s later history to world-systems formed in the Bronze Age. The Sherratts (1993) also linked regions in the Early Iron Age, with Phoenicia and Israel playing periphery to an Assyrian core. Their implicit and explicit use of world-systems follows two decades of research since economic anthropologist Jane Schneider (1977) and others began documenting core-periphery relations linked to demand for luxuries in pre-capitalist settings the world over. A synthesis of this research is presented by Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997).6

According to the Sherratts, the Uluburun wreck sank during the “climax of bulk sea trade in the Bronze Age” (Sherratt and Sherratt 1991, 372), and their model would predict that the merchants involved were directed by a palace. From early in the excavations, as the amount of gold, silver, ivory, ebony, and fi nished goods coming off the seabed increased, Pulak has been inclined to characterize the wreck as a royal shipment, but with understandable qualifi cations, either as: “an offi cial dispatch of an enormously rich and valuable cargo of raw materials and manufactured goods largely intended for a specifi c destination. [...] the ship’s cargo probably was placed in the care of an offi cial or a semi-offi cial who represented the king’s interest [...] and who also may have engaged in some private trade of his own on the side” (Pulak 1998, 220); or rather the converse, as “commercial activities taking place under the guise of royal ‘gift exchange’” (Pulak 2005, 295).

What makes the idea of this directional royal exchange inescapable as at least a partial explanation is the startling resemblance of the excavation database to the inventories of dowries and other gift-exchanges found in some Amarna Letters (e.g., EA 5, 10, 14, 16, 19, 22, 23, 25, 31, 33–41). The qualifi cations to this hypothesis are just as inescapable because of 120-plus balance pan weights found, including eight sets in the Syrian-Levantine standard (Pulak 2000). Those, plus over a half kilogram of gold and silver bullion, and three sets of bronze balance pans, strongly suggest the use of money, which falls outside the familial parameters of gift exchange per se. The mixed cargo of high-value raw goods (metals, glass, resin, wood, and ivory) and fi nished luxury goods (Cypriot ceramics especially) does not neatly fi t into any particular phase of the Sherratts’ model; nor does it violate any. The goods may have come from more than one port, one of which included a Cypriot household able

to procure fi nished luxury goods as well as enough metal to make 11 tons of bronze. From a world-systems view, if Cyprus entered the system as peripheral copper-producer to core-consumers Egypt and Hatti, as commonly understood (e.g., Knapp 2008, Iacovou 2007, Negbi 2005), then by the late 14th century it had become a highly developed semi-periphery. This rapid transformation would be tightly aligned with predictions stemming from either a liminal or world-systems perspective.

However one labels the role of Cyprus,7 one of the more demonstrable factoids of the Uluburun voyage is its stop there to load copper and ceramics. Unfortunately that act would fi t rather divergent interpretations of what the Uluburun mariners were doing. For instance, Van de Mieroop (2007, 186) suggests the Uluburun ship was ‘tramping’, a reference to the circuitous, opportunistic trading usually associated with the Cape Gelidonya shipwreck from ca. 1200 BCE (Bass 2005). As part of his social-historical longue hommage to Braudel’s (1972) Mediterranean World, Van de Mieroop (2007, 4) highlights internationalism as the defi ning characteristic of the LBA Eastern Mediterranean, and like Braudel he strives to go beyond this observation.8 But unlike Braudel, who saw world-economies in the ancient Mediterranean (1984, 25), Van de Mieroop (2007, 230) casually denies the existence of core-periphery relations and adopts instead a model of ‘peer-polity interaction’ (PPI), wherein neighbouring elites became culturally similar through competitive emulation.9 Van de Mieroop relies solely on PPI to explain the interactions of the two most powerful players on the Late Bronze Age stage, Hatti and Egypt, while his dismissal of core-periphery dynamics is a typical reaction to perceived structural rigidity in the world-system paradigm (Hall and Chase-Dunn 1993). One should not be misled to think these are mutually exclusive ways of looking at the LBA. However, choosing between these two ‘world-views’ does shape one’s imagination of the Late Bronze Age mariners’ actions: either they were playing a role in someone else’s high-stakes game of prestige and politics, or they were making up rules for their own entrepreneurial game of venture and profi t.

As McGuire (2000, 136) has noted, both core-periphery and PPI explanations involve accepting problematic structures. PPI tends to level the playing fi eld and can obfuscate undeniably hierarchical structures created by large-scale players like empires. In the LBA ‘balance of powers’ (Liverani 1990), competing empires were at the heart of what Braudel (esp. 1984) would more likely have viewed as a multi-centred ‘world economy’, the sort he saw evolving from antiquity into modernity. Stein effectively critiqued the loose application of core and periphery roles to polities involved in early Mesopotamian state emergence, but he nevertheless had to make room for how neatly the LBA Eastern Mediterranean fi t into Wallerstein’s original model


(Stein 1999, 42–3). Even so, archaeologists should bear in mind that sociological theory is not static and has moved past the core-periphery dichotomy to embrace more fl uid defi nitions of world-systems, such as this:

“intersocietal networks in which the interactions (e.g. trade, warfare, intermarriage, information) are important for the reproduction of the internal structures of the composite units and importantly affect changes that occur in these local structures” (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997, 28).

One cannot overstress how process (here the type of interaction) has triumphed over static, essentializing structure in this model, much as Turner improved on van Gennep’s use of liminality. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997, 36) see interactions determined more by modes of wealth accumulation than preexisting and geographically bounded cores or peripheries.

One may readily fi nd in the LBA world seen by Van de Mieroop, Liverani, and others the ‘information networks’ and ‘prestige-good networks’ described by Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997, 55). ‘Prestige-good network’ is the farthest reaching type of network in their typology (typically exceeding information, political, and military networks) and aptly summarizes the royal gift exchanges witnessed by the Amarna Letters. Like PPI (and the ‘distance-parity’ model of Stein 1999), it recognizes the limits on projecting power – as opposed to goods – over distance, and does not predict a strong centre-periphery hierarchy or dominance relationship. The fact that dominance relationships did exist, though not so much among the brotherhood of self-styled ‘great kings’, points out the importance of recognizing that multiple types of intersocietal networks could coexist. A valid socioeconomic model of this reality should account for the presence of various networks, and there is no inherent reason why a dynamic world-system paradigm cannot incorporate the process of elite emulation driving peer-polities down parallel paths of development on the one hand, and still illuminate what was happening in between the palaces, beyond their ownership and control, on the other.

The role of merchants in such a dynamic world-system could hardly be epiphenomenal; indeed it becomes highly transformative. The Sherratts articulated as much in 1993 by positing maritime networks and market demand for luxury goods as prime economic movers in the emergence of trading systems in both the Bronze and Iron Ages. Placing more theoretical weight on luxury goods may be the most marked distinction of post-Wallerstein world-systems thinking overall (i.e. following Schneider’s 1977 seminal work), and some have seen the impact of spreading demand for luxuries as nothing less than a “new form of semiperipheral development [that] acted to transform the tributary world-systems and to

create the basis for the eventual predominance of capitalism” (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997, 112).10

World-systems thinking, despite frequent and superfi cial attempts to cast it as simplistic or anachronistic, helps puzzle out Bronze Age trade and its effects, not because its putative structures can be perfectly mapped, but because it factors differential development at an interregional scale. Peer-polity interaction, while a useful metaphor for Mediterranean social evolution, less cogently models the salient geo-political reality of the Late Bronze Age: Egypt, Hatti, Mitanni, Assyria, and Babylonia competed, emulated, and established relative stability among themselves, but they were not neighbours in the direct sense. They were separated by various hinterlands, seas, mountain ranges, deserts, buffer-states, and vassals that amounted to good fences between neighbours good and otherwise. The ‘Great Powers’ Club’, so well described by Liverani (1990; and briefl y, 2000), was an exclusive one that refused admission to Nubia, Palestine, Syria, Cyprus, and the Aegean. These states were colonized, vassalized, execrated, and in other ways written out of more active historical roles. We can perhaps understand the ‘Sea Peoples’ as a collection of folk who resisted such marginalization and fought their way back into history through means that could be described as anti-heroic. Since the ‘world’ of the Uluburun shipwreck, or of the LBA maritime expert generally, includes phenomena like the Sea Peoples (and the more terrestrial Hapiru), a dynamic world-system model that identifi es connecting and unifying processes pertaining to ‘internationalism’ without omitting important processes that also disconnect and destabilize should be retained. Thus while the liminal status of Sea Peoples and other mariners is conceptually at home in the semi-peripheral zones of a conventional world-system approach, it is diffi cult to see where they belong in a PPI model.

It may be easier to agree that internationalism defi nes the Late Bronze Age than to agree on how that internationalism should be defi ned. Regardless of the theoretical stance taken, any interpretation of Uluburun is bound to have broad consequences. As a capsule of virtually all LBA cultures captured in transit, this little shipwreck might justifi ably be called its quintessential artefact. If maritime archaeology is to help decipher such complex material (and not just uncover it), it must be creative in both reading symbols and contextualizing them. Paradigms for understanding Bronze Age trade evolved during the 20th century as structural, essentializing parameters were relaxed and dynamic social processes such as prestige and demand were integrated. Other non-economic, a-rational factors may have more still to contribute to modelling intersocietal networks, whether we call them world-systems, peer-polities, or scatters of proximal points. After generations of focus on the economics of production (following especially Marx and Weber),


more recently on demand (following Veblen, Sombart, and Appadurai), and balancing supply and demand (Andrew and Susan Sherratt), archaeologists should be prepared to study means and modes of exchange. This entails mapping the social space of the entrepreneur, a social actor whose arena has always been the margins, interstices, semi-periphery – in other words, the liminal.

Understanding the liminal setting of early sea traders requires an admission of looking for invisible things, nothing new to archaeologists. Just as ‘pots aren’t people’, it should be stressed that neither are ships. As Bachhuber (2006) has demonstrated specifi cally for Uluburun, and Parker (1995) for shipwrecks generally, the diffi culties of cultural attribution are extreme. Wachsmann (1998, 330) aptly called ethnic identity the “single most diffi cult question […] in shipwreck archaeology”, and he counts Uluburun as “maddeningly eclectic”. This is less about site formation and more about lack of excavated harbours and historical records, making origins of crew and cargo diffi cult to identify, especially where one is dealing with a koiné or ‘internationalized’ culture. 11 If considered as a small maritime communitas, Uluburun’s putative ethnic heterogeneity looks normative, but in what context? The 14th century tomb of Kenamun, where Syrian traders arrive in their ships at an unknown Egyptian port, shows an elite transaction involving ethnically homogeneous traders. Memphis’ multicultural harbour quarter (Redford 1992, 228), on the other hand, was more the type of port to send off a mixed crew. Cypriot coastal cities like Kition and Enkomi, or the lost city of Ura in Cilicia, would also fi t the bill.

To pursue evidence of liminality or the semi-periphery in the LBA world, investigating harbours may ultimately be more important than shipwreck excavations. The harbour is the more permanent threshold between land and sea, and one would expect a greater diversity of activity represented in harbour remains than one necessarily fi nds on a shipwreck. Ugarit, like Uluburun, appears to be the best documented example of its kind to date, and is likely to remain so given the pace of current excavations. Besides being a likely home port, or at least port of call for the Uluburun ship,12 Ugarit was a heterogeneous city with presumably even more heterogeneous ports (Ras Ibn Hani, Minet el-Beida, etc.), though these are less studied than Ras Shamra. Despite its small size of 2000 km2 (Yon 2006, 9) and second-tier political status (Singer 1999), Ugarit’s kingdom was a microcosm, rich in its own liminalities that deserve separate study. Its merchants and kings dealt with each other symbiotically, a fact long known from Akkadian and Ugaritic texts (Rainey 1963; Astour 1972). ‘Royal shipments’ at Ugarit required royal and merchant capital, and mostly merchant expertise (Monroe 2009a). If the palace was conceptually organized as a patrimonial household, as Schloen (2001) argues, it still had

to fi nance itself through decentralized dealings with harbour-folk, liminal agents not unlike Artzy’s (1997) ‘nomads of the sea’ whose maritime expertise allowed shifting from tramping to directed ventures to piracy as conditions warranted. This sort of economic adaptability or ‘slipperiness’ in trading diasporas has often sewn suspicion among agriculturalists (Curtin 1984, 6). If Turner and van Gennep’s numerous examples of reaggregation mean anything, then not even ‘nomads of the sea’ would wish to remain forever at sea. Indeed, many a European maritime trader aspired to the landed aristocracy at earliest opportunity by shifting to fi nance and banking (Braudel 1982, 478–81), and Ugarit’s merchant class may have done likewise, the most successful escaping the maritime business to build their palatial homes next to the palace. From up on Ugarit they could still look down to the harbour, and keep their hands in the game without getting them too wet.13

Despite the wealth of documentation at Ugarit and the appeal of using it to contextualize a shipwreck, conclusive origins for the material and people of the Uluburun venture may never be knowable. Maritime archaeologists must often accept this kind of ambiguity, and it is worth considering if some of the ambiguities we perceive are not accidents of preservation or interpretation but accurate readings of a maritime past lived in maritime, liminal, and semi-peripheral conditions. Thus when considering the putative Mycenaeans on board the Uluburun ship (Pulak 2008, 301–02; Pulak 2005; Bachhuber 2006), must they be assigned bellicose or other non-commercial roles? A maritime communitas formed according to demands of outfi tting a merchantman might fi nd them a very different role, depending on the individual’s history, skills, and social networks. Might they not be members of an Aegean trade diaspora (Curtin 1984, 1–6), as possibly existed at Miletos? For the sake of argument, and in partial agreement with Van de Mieroop (2007, 186), if the Uluburun shipment was organized by a self-fi nanced trading community, individuals possessed of wealth might be sought for participation in a communitas regardless of their ethnicity. None of this implies the Uluburun ship was a ‘tramper’, only that the organizers possibly had affi liations, capital and itinerary not determined wholly by royals or supposed ethnic predisposition. Of course one can fairly imagine a maritime communitas to have incorporated Mycenaean mercenaries just as Pulak hypothesized.

Within this hypothetical Uluburun communitas one would also have enjoyed the company of four Syro-Canaanite members, evidenced by many artefacts but especially organized sets of balance-pan weights (Pulak 2000). Among these more profane materials they possessed were also bullion, foodstuffs, galley wares, seals, and various personal adornments. Several other items suggest the more ritualistic activities that took place aboard ship, those comporting


with a maritime cult focused on placating Asherah, Anat, Ba’al-Hadad, Shapshu and similar deities connected loosely with fertility and storm for which there are scattered bits of evidence throughout the Levant (Brody 1999). Specifi cally, Pulak (2008) hypothesizes a ritual function for a signifi cant assemblage of goods including: four faience rhyta cups and a companion female-headed cup (ibid., 340–41); four gold Syro-Canaanite ‘pendants with rayed stars’ (ibid., 350–52); a gold ‘pendant with nude female’ (ibid., 347–48); and the gilt bronze ‘nude female fi gure’ (ibid., 345–46). A gilt goddess, if not part of the cargo, would have provided a very tangible focus for reverence to a deity connected with the sea, though the fi gure defi es precise attribution. So do the pendants and the nude female representing Asherah, Anat, Astarte, Shapshu or another, while the rayed pendants symbolise perhaps the entire Canaanite pantheon and the royals at once. Ambiguity of ethnic attribution runs high among all these ritual objects, but taken as a whole their function seems clear: “Consequently, the presence of four ram-headed cups, concurrent with the presumed number of merchants on board, supports the possibility that the cups and statuette were used in shipboard rituals intended to ensure a safe and productive voyage” (Pulak 2008, 341). Thus the sacred, ritual technology that can be identifi ed bore a function not necessarily alien to the profane, commercial equipment found. Merchants used their weights to keep accounts of cargo, the integrity of which was protected by laws (Wachsmann 1998, 323–25), and perhaps to calculate profi t and loss (Monroe 2009a). Only with such tools could the risks of maritime ventures be undertaken repeatedly in anything resembling a rational pursuit of profi t; and only with the aid of fl uid ritual equipment could the mariners survive within their fl uid cognitive landscape.

Thus a number of fi nds from Uluburun express the liminal conditions of the LBA world and perhaps a small communitas within it. Ritual vessels, pendants, and fi gures were suffi ciently ambiguous to be used anywhere along the ship’s route, as were the balance-pan weights. The ambiguity was thus an intentioned response to the fl uid conditions mariners were operating within. Taken thus with all its ambiguity, the Uluburun shipment (and putative communitas) fi ts well within the Bronze Age world in which the Sherratts (1991; A. Sherratt 1994), describe a spreading demand for luxury goods and especially metal. Whether one leans toward inter-regnal, command economics or commerce for explanation, it is hard to deny the impact such a hoard of goods would have had on local minds and economies. The Uluburun shipment contained wealth probably exceeding what was annually demanded of entire vassal kingdoms (Monroe 2010). That such liquid wealth could be destabilizing, the Sherratts also recognized, especially in the threat of commodifi cation posed to more traditional societies being reached by the northern

and western spread of maritime trade in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. Andrew Sherratt (1994, 343) concluded even that “European societies were actively resisting” this threat. One might add that commodifi cation is a process well suited to liminal spaces, especially maritime, where merchants were freer to pursue profi t and accept its risks. If it were possible to somehow gauge the transformative energy borne by all maritime and other long-distance traders during the LBA, one wonders if it would not exceed that destabilizing energy of the Sea Peoples so dramatically illustrated by Ramesses III’s Medinet Habu reliefs. By participating in the transformative spread of wealth, knowledge and demand, royal merchants, independent mariners, caravaneers, and semi-nomadic folk all contributed to the great historical rise and demise witnessed in the Late Bronze Age.

Toward the horizonShips throw even more wild cards into the deck of internation-alism. As van Gennep noted, travellers are sacred. They gain status, and more if by sea, because they have travelled the un-owned, unmarked, and chaotic; they are, effectively, conquering heroes. If seafaring merchants brought along a travelling deity, like the gilt one found at Uluburun, their sacred stature was increased and their dealing more boundless (Meier 2007).

The transformative power of maritime spaces – whether, geographic, mythic, literary, or cultic – is a global and ancient phenomenon. It shapes cultural practices and foreign exchange, including reciprocal giving, trade diasporas, full-blown colonization and world-systems. Intercultural relations are facilitated through partnerships, patron-client relationships, and eventually contracts and laws structured to ameliorate anxieties about the sea and the seafarer. When colonizing sea powers begin enforcing commerce with conquest (Braudel 1984, 175, 213, 266), hydroliminal spaces are exploited by states willing to project dehumanizing ideologies onto unknown Others. Historical differences aside, this practice seems descended from policies like the Egyptian one regarding Asia and Nubia from the Middle Kingdom onward (Shaw 2000, 166–67; for nuances, Koenig 2007).

Exploitation is the ugly side of what liminal or peripheral status can entail. Yet Turner’s process predicts a variety of potential outcomes that look more like the continuum of actual intersocietal relations in world history. As one anecdotal example, seafaring traders like the 13th century AD Polos could escape a restrictive regime, conduct ventures at sea, and rejoin society enriched, without dehumanizing the various Others encountered. Ironically, Marco’s reputation suffered partially because he so admired the Other. As Turner teaches, structure always reasserts itself (1969, 176), and in a


more sustained diachronic study than could be attempted here, charting this process might yield dramatic conclusions.

Viewing maritime trade through a liminal lens situates its limited remains in a richer socioeconomic context of structures and anti-structures. By injecting Turner’s dialectical view of society into the intersocietal networks mapped out in world-systems, liminal theory can add agency and cognitive context to shipwrecks and other trading sites. Beyond asking who traded what and where, liminality addresses motivations besides profi t that underlay the formation of trading communities. Maritime trade was a fraught business, and where it went so went the anxieties inherent to its internal practices and external perceptions. Unfortunately for historians, liminality swells with ambiguity. Not to be confused with meaninglessness, this is ambiguity fostering autonomy, power, and transformation. In ecological terms the maritime threshold offers resources unavailable elsewhere; liminality suggests these resources could be as valuable as imports, perhaps especially so in the Bronze Age. In a world of physical chaos and fi nancial risks, a ship acting as a liminal agent (per Westerdahl 2005) was very powerful. Lest this notion be misconstrued as ecological determinism, it is important to remember that semi-peripheries, liminal states, ships and harbours were all constructed with intention. Skilled people, what one might call ‘liminal experts’, made these things that then became transformative and signifi cant. The sea by itself was only part of the threshold; human agency determined the rest. The autonomy, ambiguity, risk, technical skill, and power that surged in places like Ugarit or aboard little ships like the one at Uluburun added up to strong historical forces that make impersonally described world-systems feel a bit more realistic, even humanistic. Liminality offered a great source of wealth to some members of LBA society. In cultures with strongly demarcated ethnic boundaries, freedom to associate with the Other, for profi t or other purposes, was a kind of luxury in itself, paid for with confrontations of deep anxieties.

AcknowledgementsI wish to thank those who thoughtfully responded to ideas in this paper, including: participants in the 2008 Annual Meetings of the American Schools of Oriental Research, participants in the Cornell Near Eastern Studies department colloquium series, students in my seminar entitled “Liminality and Maritime Archaeology”, two anonymous reviewers, Ezra Marcus, Lauren Monroe, and especially the 2008–09 fellows at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where a signifi cant portion of the research and writing for this paper was done.

Notes1 Adherents to Wallerstein’s 1974 formulation might expect a

more dualistic conception. Others, beginning but certainly not ending with Schneider (1977) and Braudel (1984), have seen world-economies/systems as more variable, involving the interplay of at least three essential structures defi ned as core, periphery, and semi-periphery. Interactions within and between various kinds of intersocietal networks have been systematically and comparatively explored by Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997).

2 Property rights and their manipulation are not as defi nitive in Bronze Age sources (cf. Earle 2000, 48–53) as for Classical Athens, where maritime traders were ruthlessly suppressed but for a handful of ship owners; they were mostly poor and foreign, without juridical power or land (Reed 2003, 3–4, 12, 36, 85–8).

3 Connectivity preoccupies Horden and Purcell (2000) and Harris (2005). Metaphorically, ‘world’ appears ubiqui tously in van Gennep, all Braudel’s works, and Van de Mieroop’s (2007) LBA-situated homage to Braudel.

4 A rough list would have to include the following: the role of the Persian Gulf in 3rd millennium Mesopotamia, rising complexity in 2nd millennium Cyprus; Sea Peoples and the early 12th century collapse; Phoenician emergence from collapse; Athenian thalassocracy; the role of the Nile and Mediterranean in the Roman Empire; Arab trade in the Indian Ocean; Vikings; the Hanseatic League; the Maritime Republics and rise of capitalism; New World explorations, etc.

5 Many others (e.g. Adams 1974; Snell 1997; Schloen 2005; Manning and Morris 2005; Earle 2002; Smith 2004) see continual theoretical engagement necessary for side-stepping a fool’s paradise where facts exist sui generis.

6 Despite the paradigmatic shift away from Wallerstein’s elegant construction of consuming, imperial cores exploit ing the raw goods of productive peripheries, world-systems thinking is frequently, erroneously equated with Wallerstein’s model alone.

7 See especially Knapp 2008 on arguments for (and against) a politically unifi ed Cyprus in the LBA.

8 For a review of Van de Mieroop’s fi ne book see Monroe 1999b.

9 Thanks to Renfrew and Cherry (1986) and others, PPI has replaced diffusion as a way to understand how states in the Aegean emerged through external (Near Eastern) infl uence and local agency; though compare comments on diffusion by Rahmstorf and others in this volume.

10 How important capitalism, incipient or otherwise, may have been to transformations at the end of the Bronze Age is a question for lengthy debate and resolvable only with more evidence than is presently available. My own attempt to consider the transformative role of the LBA entrepreneur has recently appeared (Monroe 2009a).

11 This is not to ignore the relative homogeneity found aboard, e.g., Imperial Roman wrecks (Parker 1992). For an interesting art historical investigation of LBA inter nationalism, see Feldman 2006.

12 Based on an assemblage of fi nds and their parallels on land


sites, Pulak (2008, 303) estimates the most likely home port to be “just north of the Carmel coast”.

13 Besides the detailed accounts regarding trade and entre preneurs provided by Singer (1999, esp. 653–78) and Monroe (2009a), see also the concise pieces by Malbran-Labat (2000) and Yves-Calvet (2000). More about LBA trade and liminality will be learned once the archives of a coastal kārum is excavated. Until then, one can look to other periods for better documented harbour activities. Thanks to Margariti’s 2007 book, Medieval Aden has recently become a rich source. As Margariti points out (2007, 8), the study of ports is inherently fl uid and impeded by overly structured models.

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'From luxuries to anxieties': a liminal view of the Late Bronze Age world-system

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