ABSTRACT
The term colonisation has been used rather differently by individual researchers over the years, but it has generally been equated to permanent settlement. This chapter aims to foreground an improved theory of island colonisation. Colonisation is viewed as the establishment of settlements, with little attention to other activities carried out by humans on islands, even though Cherry himself had noted that the archaeological record reflects a complex variety of strategies. For the eastern Mediterranean, Cherry criticised Evans's claim that island colonisation was a Neolithic phenomenon, although he acknowledged that future finds might change the picture. Broodbank argued that the causes of island colonisation in the Aegean could be explained by the islands' configuration. He offered an approach to model the extent of the islandscapes' by determining navigation ranges from the islands, which depend on technology and environmental conditions varying over time.
