Maritime Cultural Landscapes

During more than one year (2016-2017) public works at Campo das Cebolas, in downtown Lisbon, have exposed archaeological complexes related with his waterfront. This central node of the city and harbor was essential since the Portuguese maritime expansion which spans a period of 500 years, gathering mercantile and daily life activities, buildings, small shipyards, and ships connecting water and land.

This paper presents a summary of the finds and a comment of the interest of this excavation, carried out by the municipality of Lisbon (EMEL), due to the construction of an underground parking area and urban rehabilitation, with a big team of more than 50 archaeologists, conservative restorers and technicians of 3D digital records.

A loss of place-names, and of the knowledge of history those named places hold, is effectively a significant cultural loss, and for this reason it was deemed important to record named places at Caution Bay before those localities were permanently altered. Therefore, named, culturally meaningful places within and near the Caution Bay study area were recorded in conjunction with local Koita and Motu community members in 2008-2010. This mapping was undertaken in two steps, the first consisting of opportunistic recording of place names during early, preliminary stages of fieldwork in 2008 and 2009; and the second a focused study undertaken in early 2010 explicitly aimed at recording place names and their cultural significance in the face of imminent developments that would forever transform the landscape. This chapter presents the results of these studies.

This book is available Open Access directly from Springer at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-03635-5

Archaeologists have aspired to a seamless integration of terrestrial and marine survey since maritime archaeology began to emerge as a distinct sub-discipline. This chapter will review and discuss how 3D technology is changing the way that archaeologists work, blurring the boundaries between different technologies and different environments. Special attention is paid to the integration of data obtained from aerial and underwater methods. Maritime archaeology is undergoing an explosion of site recording methods and techniques which improve survey, excavation and interpretation, as well as management and conservation of material culture, protected sites, and cultural landscapes. An appraisal of methods and interpretive tools is therefore necessary as well as a consideration of how theoretical concepts of maritime landscapes are finding new expressions in practice. A thematic focus is placed on integrating land and sea through case studies of maritime archaeological sites and material which range chronologically from the recent past to several thousand years before present.

This research explores the tradition of fisheries and fishing techniques on the island of Cyprus during the Roman period. The maritime cultural landscape indicates fishing activities were important in the utilisation of maritime space in the Roman Mediterranean (Westerdahl, 1992). Regarding archaeological, iconographical and written evidence, fishing could be characterised as a small-scale activity for supporting a fisherman’s family, or as an organised societal activity involving fishermen collaborating with fish-salting establishments.

The research presented here aims to demonstrate how perceptions of the maritime cultural landscape on the island of Cyprus can help to interpret the role the Mediterranean region played in the cultural, technological and ideological developments of traditional fishing activities in Cyprus. Furthermore, the island’s topography played a key role in how maritime exchanges and fishing practices were developed. Maritime communities relied on accumulated cognitive knowledge and mental-maps of the landscape, often preserved through oral traditions, to navigate and identify key fishing grounds. As with ancient navigation, landmarks and toponyms played an important structural role in the fishermen’s perceptions of the coastal landscape. Fishing practices would likely have been based on specialised knowledge and acquired familiarity of the fishing environment, seasonality and associated fishing gear and techniques, as well as how best to exploit characteristics of different fish species such as their favoured habitats and sea conditions. Thus, this research attempts to examine how the physical Mediterranean environment determines the presence or absence of fishing activities within its maritime landscape and, in turn, to further understand the relationship between fishermen and their maritime environment through fishing activity.

Furthermore, the research intends to combine the terrestrial with the underwater archaeological data of the fishing methods from twelve sites in Cyprus in an attempt to acquire a better general understanding of the formative phases of fisheries on the island during the Roman Period. The fish bone assemblages and the iconographical and written data are a supporting class of evidence, in order to determine the development of the fishing technologies and to discover if and when the fishing activities had an influence on the economy and the daily life of the communities of the island. This research forms part of an ongoing project that will contribute towards a more holistic understanding of the relationship between fishermen and their maritime cultural landscape in Roman Cyprus.

This paper examines the theory and practice of the maritime cultural landscape in general, and projects the theoretical concepts and aspects involved on the highly dynamic late medieval northeastern Zuiderzee region in the Netherlands. The cultivation of land and marine erosion (floods and rising sea level) are considered as the main factors that caused the transformation of the physical landscape of this region from peatlands with freshwater basins into a tidal lagoon. As a consequence, multiple settlements drowned, large areas of land submerged, and culture and the landscape gradually became more maritime, giving the research area a cultural identity and dimension.