Throughout history, islands have been treated as distinct places, unlike mainland and continental masses. But are islands inherently different from mainlands? Historically in the Mediterranean, some islands rose to the role of mini-continents due to their size and economic and political importance. Ancient Greeks, for example, considered Sicily a continent in its own right.1 Likewise, the large Mediterranean islands of Crete, Cyprus and Sardinia were often given a special status due to their size, occupying an intermediate position between small island worlds, such as the Aegean islands system, and the surrounding landmasses. The affiliated term ‘insularity’ – belonging to/being of an island – has been romanticised and associated with otherness both in the ancient and modern times.2
Islands were first studied from an environmental perspective and were considered as ideal units of analysis due to their circumscribed local environments, finite resources and the uniqueness of their ecosystems. The early island studies drove the archaeological explorations of island societies, but they also carried a somewhat deterministic view of island life based on geographic boundaries and cultural relativism.3 The emphasis on geographic insularity as a relatively timeless portrayal of island life, however, takes away from a deeper engagement with the concept of island identity. The degree of openness as well as the intensity of connections within and between islands fluctuated over time depending on historical circumstances.4 Insularity is therefore a dynamic concept dependent on specific socio-historical conditions rather than mere geography. It is ultimately a form social identity – one’s sense of belonging to a group based on perceived social similarities and differences – and cultural strategy rather than a reflection of the islanders’ inability to connect with the people around them.5
Insularity, be it a physical or imagined concept, therefore rests on a complex interplay between locality and connectivity. Yet inhabitants of the same island might not have shared the same type of identity; rather, island identities might have shifted depending on the inhabitants’ daily lives and experiences as well as connections within and beyond their immediate surroundings. For instance, intra-island fragmentation is well attested in Early Iron Age to Hellenistic Cyprus when its sociopolitical landscape was divided into seven city-kingdoms.6 And while the inhabitants of each of these kingdoms could associate with a common, supralocal identity of the Cypriots, the Kyprioi,7 this affiliation did not deny the existence of a more diverse range of identities. The Late Bronze Age nuragic societies of Sardinia were long considered as sharing a homogeneous cultural insular identity based on a set of common, island-wide features of practices and lifeways, focused on living in the vicinity of a nuraghe, an indigenous stone tower.8 This identity, however, was a product of diverse social choices and was a subject to definition and reconfiguration of the islanders’ conception of self and their interactions with their surroundings and others within it.
Even though islands’ symbolic boundaries could be maintained more easily as they coincided with firm physical boundaries of sea and land, at no point in antiquity were they coherent social or cultural entities with fixed borders. Just like on a mainland, there was much diversity within islands, with social, cultural, economic, and political networks often stretching beyond their limits. The extent of networks of interaction was dependent on the interplay between the different communities within an island – inhabiting diverse ecological niches from coastal areas to low lying or mountainous inland territories – with other islands and nearby landmasses. Islands were ultimately connected to their neighbours and hence did not present bounded or uniform spatial units but ranged in character.9
While islands and mainlands differ in many aspects, they are circumscribed by coast with more and less accessible shorelines. These coastal habitats were a common locus of activities such as travelling, meeting and subsistence, shared by both islands and landmasses. From the coast, Mediterranean peoples could often spot other shores, and in fact all three large islands can be seen from the mainland.10 This visual connectivity transcended geographical boundaries and may have played into a sense of association between coasts. Ports functioned as the more heterogeneous spaces, in which travellers and locals met. Indeed, this sense of connectedness might have been stronger than within-island links between communities that practiced different lifestyles and inhabited different environments. Insularity as a phenomenon might have therefore been more pertinent to certain parts of an island rather than others. The island of Crete with its striking mountains and deep gorges is a good example of the divergences between local pastoral lifestyle and the extra-island connectivity participated in and facilitated by coastal centres and fishing as well as sea-faring activities on the coast.11
The islands enclosed by the Mediterranean Sea thus comprise diverse cultural environments characterised by an unusual degree of interconnectivity. Connectivity has been an important feature of island life, as the sea can be a linking rather than just a dividing body, motivating and maintaining informal and formal connections. This has been increasingly evident in the study of the archaeology, art, and history of the Mediterranean islands from the antiquity to the present,12 and a recognition of islands’ special position within the Mediterranean landscape gave rise to a branch of research, island archaeology.13 Recent scholarship on the Mediterranean islands gives the primacy to human agency, characterised by both opportunities and restrictions, by emphasising a relational view of island-human interaction.14 Being an Islander project follows this current development in research and seeks to illustrate the manifold connections within and also between islands.
1: Rackham and Moody 1996, xi; Constantakopoulou 2007, 12-15; Kopaka and Cadogan 2012, 18-19. 2: For example, in Homer (e.g., Odyssey 5.60; 9.145-155; 10.1.5), Hesiod (Theognis 963-4), and Thucydides (I.143.4-5) (Constantakopoulou 2005, 2-3; 2007; Kopaka and Cadogan 2012, 19); for a comment on modern portrayal see Knapp 2007, 38-9. 3: For a critique of such approaches see Patton 1996, van Dommelen 1999; Broodbank 2000; Knapp 2007; Ulf 2008; Cadogan, Iacovou, Kopaka, and Whitley 2012. 4: Sahlins 1985; Knapp and Blake 2004; Knapp 2008; Broodbank 2013, 342. 5: Broodbank 2000; Cherry 2004; Gordon 2018, 10. 6: Iacovou 2013; Janes 2015. 7: Various contributions in Georgiou 2012 and Pilides and Papadimitriou 2012. 8: Blake 1999; 2015. 9: Boomert and Bright 2007, 18. 10: Broodbank 2000, fig. 4. 11: Kopaka and Cadogan 2012. 12: For sea as a dividing body and islands as isolated see Braudel 1972; for sea as a connector see Horden and Purcell 2000; Broodbank 2013. 13: Broodbank 2000; Bevan and Conolly 2013. 14: Dawson 2014.
