Movement of people and their material culture across the Mediterranean is one of the few factors that have consistently characterised the region from early prehistory until the present day. The shores of the Mediterranean Sea were settled early in the Palaeolithic, but most islands and in particular larger ones in more distant locations – e.g. Cyprus, Crete and Sardinia – or several, small isolated ones such as the Balearics and Pantelleria do not seem to have been inhabited permanently until the Mesolithic (Late Epipalaeolithic) or even the Bronze Age, as a slow process of migration from the mainland shores towards the islands gradually unfolded (Broodbank 2013: 126–28, 148–56). The absence of permanent settlement, of course, does not preclude earlier visits and short-term stays, as people moved back and forth across the seas to exchange raw materials and manufactured goods well before they established themselves on a more permanent basis. The islands of Pantelleria and Ibiza offer a good case in point, as they were not permanently settled until respectively the Bronze Age and the Phoenician period (Iron Age). Both islands nevertheless had been visited repeatedly or even intermittently occupied in earlier periods, as Pantellerian obsidian was exchanged across the southern central Mediterranean from the late Neolithic onwards, and several megalithic Bronze Age burials are known from Ibiza (Gómez Bellard 1995; Tykot 1996; Ardesia et al. 2006; Ramis 2010).
While ‘mobility’ in the broadest sense of the term has thus been a fact of life of Mediterranean people throughout (pre)history, these brief examples readily make it clear that more focused attention for the specific characteristics of these processes is necessary to grasp what was happening on the ground, as well as at sea. Bundling the notions of migration, colonisation and mobility to define the present set of chapters reflects our intention to probe these processes in more detail and to bring out their variability, as they capture different albeit partially overlapping sections of the broad spectrum of ‘mobility’ that may be discerned in Mediterranean prehistory and protohistory.
Of this triad, colonisation is the term with the longest tradition in Mediterranean archaeology, as it is the conventional label used to describe the establishment of overseas ‘colonial’ settlements in the Iron Age by Greeks and Phoenicians, as well as others such as Carthaginians and Romans later still. As these settlements were by and large new foundations that maintained their own distinctive identity in the new settings, often taking over and bringing cultural change to the ‘colonised regions’, they substantially intensified and transformed existing contacts and mobility patterns. Thus, it was the Iron Age that saw the emergence of intensive Mediterranean-wide networks, to the extent that we can state without exaggeration that colonisation became a hallmark of the Iron Age Mediterranean (Hodos 2006; Malkin 2011; van Dommelen 2012; Isayev 2013).
Despite a century or more of colonisation studies in Classical archaeology, only in the last decade or two has the focus of scholarship shifted from generic studies of Greek and ‘Oriental’ influence and cultural impact, as perhaps best represented by ‘Orientalization’ studies (Riva and Vella 2006), to the study of the actual presence and interaction of people of both colonial and indigenous descent in colonial situations. Migration is nevertheless only very gradually coming to the fore, as it represents a concept that has long received very little attention in archaeology overall. Although migration played a very prominent role in culture-historical approaches to archaeology, in which large-scale movements of people were used to explain cultural change, the fierce critique of the New Archaeology meant that migration was no longer deemed a meaningful concept and accordingly was sidelined, a situation that more or less persists today (Anthony 1990; Knapp 2009; van Dommelen 2012).
Mobility is the overarching concept and, in our view, a necessary complement to the two foregoing notions, as it is not limited to movement of people but explicitly also includes movement of objects, otherwise typically referred to as ‘exchange’. Informed by recent material culture studies and notions such as the ‘social biography’ of objects, ‘object diasporas’ and ‘things-in-motion’ (Knapp and van Dommelen 2010), mobility has begun to be used as a conceptual tool to explore the cultural and material connections that were forged between distant regions, often separated by sea. This enables us not just to track the distribution of objects but also to investigate the role and significance of exchanged objects in multiple contexts and to arrive at a much fuller understanding of what mobility entailed and brought about across the Mediterranean.
While transport and voyaging could be considered under this heading as well, the emphasis in this section is not so much on the mechanics of mobility as on understanding the ways in which the actual displacement of objects and indeed of people themselves resonated with people’s self-perception and their views of their place in the world – in short, how ‘material connections’ contributed to the ‘creation of difference’ (Rowlands 2010: 235). As Greenblatt (2010: 250) recently argued, ‘mobility must be taken in a highly literal sense’, because ‘[o]nly when conditions directly related to literal movement are firmly grasped will it be possible fully to understand the metaphorical movements’.
This point is abundantly and convincingly brought home by the chapters in this section. They remind us first of all that the Mediterranean Bronze and Iron Ages cover the entire range of mobility of people and objects, from long-term and long-distance connections in not always straightforward ways (Levant, Anatolia, Iberia) to migration and colonisation not just to islands (Cyprus) but also on mainlands (south Italy).