FACULTY OF SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL SCIENCES

9 January 2012

UCL Institute of Archaeology 75th Anniversary Inaugural Lecture Series

Archaeology Lecture Theatre G6, Institute of Archaeology, 31–34 Gordon Square, 6.15pm

Professor Cyprian Broodbank (Institute of Anthropology)

Cyprian Broodbank was born and bred in London. He read History at Oxford, Aegean and Anatolian Prehistory at Bristol, and took his PhD at Cambridge. His first book, An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades, won the Runciman and James R. Wiseman prizes, and he has held visiting posts at All Souls, Cincinnati and the Archaeological Institute of America. He is a director of the Kythera Island Project, and is completing a history of the early Mediterranean.

The Making of the Middle Sea:
How the Mediterranean Came into Being

The Mediterranean comprises the world’s largest inland sea, the greatest extent of a rare, challenging environment on the planet, and its societies and culture have had an impact on global history immensely greater than the basin’s size would predict. Their characteristics have been well explored by Classical, Roman and later historians. But almost all the fundamental elements (e.g. seafaring, trade networks, cultivation and consumption practices, ideologies and urbanism), in fact emerged and coalesced far earlier, during the region’s long, exceptionally vibrant ‘prehistory’. This invites large-scale archaeological investigation across a broad canvas, from the end of the Ice to the start of the Iron Age, by which time the making of this middle sea was complete.