ABSTRACT
The cultural landscapes of the Mediterranean Basin are complex, ancient and diverse. Long regarded as one of the major cultural hearths of world civilisation, the ‘greater’ or ‘historical’ Mediterranean defined by Braudel (1972) has been home since at least the eighth millennium Bc to a succession of cultures of varying origins, ethnicity, social complexity and technological attainment. Braudel’s historical Mediterranean extended far beyond the physical littoral which forms the focus of this book, south to the southern margins of the Sahara; east to the Syrian desert and the Asian steppes, and finally north and west to the Alps and the Atlantic. But the defining unifying core was the Mediterranean Sea itself, and around its shores peoples and ideologies have collided throughout history in processes of assimilation, integration and eradication which have left numerous, frequently enigmatic, traces in the contemporary human landscape.
