Chapter 8. Navigating Maritime Small Worlds in the Contemporary Ethnoarchaeological Moment

ABSTRACT

In this chapter, I describe an intellectual journey to ethnoarchaeology, which began with long‐term archaeological research focused on recovering lost coastal communities of the Bronze Age Mediterranean and reconstructing their local‐scale social and economic networks. The absence of texts, long‐term environmental change, ephemeral sites, and neglect by modern scholars in favor of more sensational evidence for elite, long‐distance trade all conspire to obscure the people whose everyday lives might include fishing, producing salt, and mediating between sea and land. Initially, the adoption of an ethnoarchaeological component seemed a logical way to “fill in the gaps,” but once I took it on board and expanded my cross‐cultural scope to South India, I was confronted with a host of new considerations that have transformed the research in a variety of ways. Here, I stake out a position grounded in traditions of anthropological and archaeological practice but inflected with postcolonial movements within ethnoarchaeology, such as “archaeological ethnography,” that emphasize collaboration and partnership with the people we study. With openness to new approaches and critiques, ethnoarchaeology should be a vibrant subdiscipline well into the future.