The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World by Broodbank Cyprian

Author:Broodbank, Cyprian [Broodbank, Cyprian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
Published: 2013-12-01T22:00:00+00:00

8.58 A boat-shaped house at Es Coll de Cala Morell on Menorca, mid-2nd millennium BC in date and still broadly similar to those occupied by the first generations of Balearic islanders.

8.59 The cliffs of Menorca are riddled with rock-cut tombs mainly dating to the 2nd millennium BC.

Further east, from Catalonia to Mediterranean France, among a patchwork of coastal lagoons, cleared lowlands, surviving woods and limestone uplands, the social and economic profile remained modest among the communities living by farming plus, in France, still a substantial amount of hunting.415 Near the mouth of the Rhône, as before a favoured point at the convergence of coastal and interior routes, a sizeable defended enclosure arose at Camp de Laure,416 but otherwise communities remained small and simple, indeed even less noticeable in the second half of the millennium than the first, with few striking finds save for a handful of pieces of faience and amber percolating in from the north. Copper mining actually declined in the Midi, as local mineralizations were eclipsed by larger, more organized extraction of the high Alpine ores, in the west notably at Saint-Véran.417 Throughout the 2nd millennium BC southern France kept its back to the sea and maintained an introverted way of life, largely sufficient unto itself in an unusually clement Mediterranean niche. Together with the open seas of the west, this created a substantial buffer between Argaric developments and others in the central Mediterranean.

An island of towers

Heading southeast from France over the apparently largely empty sea, we bear down on another archaeologically prominent zone that rivals the Argaric in its demand for our attention. Corsica was in this respect secondary to its larger neighbour, and more cut off. Corsican dolmens and especially menhirs retained great local significance; over 250 of the latter were aligned in attenuated rows at Palaghju [8.60], while at Filitosa a strange complex of towers, menhirs, huts and perimeter wall was erected from around 1600 BC.418 Meanwhile, in the south a few stone towers (torres) mirrored on a stubbier scale a new way of life across the Strait of Bonifacio. For in Sardinia an extraordinary new template for the standard living unit emerged, one that thrust 15–20 m (50–65 ft) skyward in a thick granite- or basalt-walled, multi-storey conical tower topped with a balcony, dark and pokey on the inside but out in the landscape prominent from afar [PL. XXXV].419 We have already come across these nuraghi (a name traceable to Roman times, and surely Bronze Age in origin) in Chapter 1 as identity symbols for modern separatists, and in this chapter as robust ruins that encourage population estimates.

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