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This handsome 158-page volume focuses on the Mediterranean and its role in the Bell Beaker phenomenon. Throughout the book, the sea emerges both as an inhabited space and as a medium for communication and circulation. This maritime perspective shifts attention away from continental Europe and highlights the diversity of Bell Beaker expressions across the Mediterranean islands – particularly the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and Sicily – which formed important nodes between North Africa and southern Europe.
The book is organised into three sections, each addressing a specific research question. The first explores the development of long-distance Bell Beaker networks. The contributions examine ivory circulation within the Iberian Peninsula and the different African and Asian sources of this material; employ a substantial corpus of radiocarbon dates to identify three phases of connectivity across the western Mediterranean; and apply network analysis to decorated Bell Beaker pottery from the western and central Mediterranean. Together, these offerings present the Mediterranean as a connected space through which materials, objects, and practices circulated.
The second section investigates mechanisms of mobility, exchange, and cultural interaction through artefacts such as Palmela points, pottery, and wrist-guards. The contributions range from a reassessment of 19th-century archaeological collections from Portugal to technological and typological analyses of pottery from major Spanish sites such as El Cerro de la Virgen and Los Millares. The section includes a study of 39 wrist-guards from Sicily and Sardinia, including an example bearing anthropomorphic and zoomorphic decoration.
The third section broadens the geographical and analytical scale to address circulation networks, regional dynamics, and processes of integration and discontinuity. Discussions focus on north-eastern Spain, south-eastern France, the Balearic Islands, and Sardinia. Particularly valuable are the regional chronological frameworks and the discussion of relationships between Bell Beaker material and local cultural contexts. The Balearic evidence includes characteristic pottery, V-perforated buttons, wrist-guards, riveted daggers, and copper awls, while the Sardinian contribution highlights the chronological challenges related to the Ozieri culture and the Bell Beaker phenomenon.
Numerous maps included throughout the volume provide exceptionally rich archaeological documentation. The wide range of sites, materials, and regional case studies covered is one of this publication’s major strengths, allowing the reader to move between different scales of analysis, from individual artefacts to Mediterranean-wide networks.
Overall, the volume offers a stimulating perspective on the Mediterranean of the 4th and 3rd millennia BC, which ultimately emerges as ‘a large maritime cultural area’. One of the book’s principal achievements is its ability to demonstrate this broader Mediterranean coherence without obscuring regional and insular diversity. The sea thus appears not as a boundary, but as a space of connectivity linking communities, objects, and practices across the Mediterranean.
REVIEW BY MARIE BESSE
Bell Beakers and the Mediterranean: maritime connections and networks
Eve Derenne et al. (eds)
Oxbow, £39
ISBN 979-8888572399
