ABSTRACT
The Atlantic coastline of Europe, from the Straits of Gibraltar to North Cape, presents for the most part a landscape of craggy granitic headlands and narrow marine inlets punctuated by low-lying basins and estuaries giving access to the interior. Traditional similarities between the coastal communities of Galicia, Brittany, Ireland and western Britain have given rise to the idea that these areas share a common heritage, linked by their proximity to the sea. This Atlantic identity – if such it is – may have been forged by millennia of maritime contact, but could also owe much to the special character of the Atlantic fringe in itself, as the land at the edge of the world, beyond which there was nowhere to go. It has recently been suggested that such factors may have induced the formation of a characteristic Atlantic mind-set as long ago as the Mesolithic period (Cunliffe 2001, 155). There are certainly archaeological parallels in such features as passage graves to suggest a measure of contact between Portugal and Scandinavia in the Neolithic, and sea-borne contacts can be pursued by archaeology into later periods through the evidence of Maritime Beakers, Atlantic bronzes and the tin trade.
