Study context: In the Mediterranean, cultures and ideas from Europe, Asia and Africa interact within a particular framework of ecological and maritime conditions. Scholars such as Braudel and Horden & Purcell have explored the consequences of this unparalleled set of circumstances on the basin’s history over the last 2500 years. But far earlier, developments during the Bronze Age were arguably just as important in shaping the trajectories of Mediterranean societies and, via these, the overall history of Europe. It was during the Bronze Age that the Mediterranean underwent a highly dynamic period of change that resulted in the definite break from ‘egalitarian’ types of organisation and the formation of the first clearly hierarchical societies across South Europe and the Levant.

Our understanding of the emergence of institutionalised inequalities in the Mediterranean remains enmeshed in deep-rooted and often conflicting explanatory models. These vary from World Systemic views that emphasize the influence of the cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia, to approaches that explore how specifically Mediterranean geographical and ecological characteristics might have encouraged comparable but distinct developments in the basin.

Aims: This work represents the first structured effort to create an in-depth, up-to-date and bottom-up comparative study that would enable us (a) to test these explanatory options, (b) to decide how they are best combined and (c) to explain why a diverse range of communities across the Mediterranean underwent decisive socio-political transformations at the beginning of the Bronze Age.

The final aim of the research is to explore how and why different societies around the Mediterranean experienced major transformations during the first half of the Bronze Age, and whether these episodes can be understood within a similar Mediterranean framework.

Research structure: To structure the comparative framework, I have identified four principal overarching and interconnected themes, which enable a break from traditional studies and for the first time, bring together several relevant social scales: the local community, immediate hinterland and broad geographical region. Such focus on well-defined themes allows for a bottom-up approach that fleshes-out the comparison using detailed archaeological data and avoids the short comes of a traditional overview approach. This study will be based principally on the review of the exceptional quantity and quality of extant archaeological datasets related to these four themes in each of the regions investigated:

Demographic dynamics which involve the shifting size and distribution of populations, as well as the structure of settlement patterns within the landscapes of each region.

Interaction networks that existed on land and across the sea (or along the coast) to differing degrees in each region. The investigation will analyse their scale in terms of range and quantities of conveyance as well as the type of materials exchanged.

Resource exploitation covers farming activities (including irrigation and crops such as olive and vine), pastoralism and mineral extraction and their integration to create ways of life resilient to short-term uncertainties, yet also amenable to social manipulation.

Social ideologies and funerary practices reveal the ways in which unequal power relationships were established, presented and modified in the mortuary domain, a key social arena in the three regions.

Each of these themes is the subject of a detailed analysis within each of the three locales chosen for the study and later combined in their regional context to define the particular trajectory of each area. Subsequently, the results of the three regions are contrasted in order to discover the similarities and divergences between areas and explore the possible influences of Mediterranean traits in their development.

Geographical focus: The analysis entails the detailed comparative study of three similarly sized yet distinct regions of the Mediterranean. These have been strategically chosen because of their early evidence for socio-political change at different distances from the Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures and moreover, because of their very different regional history of development:

The southern Levant is a nuclear zone of early agriculture and part of a connecting corridor between Egypt and Mesopotamia. During the Early Bronze Age (3500-2000 BCE) the region produced the first evidence of social hierarchy that was comparable to that observed further west.

At the opposite end of the Mediterranean, the research in south-east Spain will concentrate on the Chalcolithic Los Millares (3200-2200 BCE) and Bronze Age El Argar (2200-1500 BCE) phenomena, which constitutes outstanding evidence for the rise of a hierarchical society largely pristine given its isolation from Egypt and the Near East but which failed to reach a stable state level organisation.

The southern Aegean occupies an intermediate position, open to distant contact with the Near East. It includes the Early Bronze Age of Crete, the Peloponnese and the Cyclades down to the appearance of the ‘Minoan’ states on Crete (3200-1800 BCE), the first of their kind in Mediterranean Europe.