On Being an Islander: Reflections on Current Exhibitions in Oxford and Cambridge

Exhibitions currently showing at the University Museums of Oxford and Cambridge tackle the question of what it means, and what it has meant in the past, to be an "islander." The exhibition at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, "Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality" (showing until 30th July), focuses, specifically, on the Bronze Age "Palace Civilisation" of Crete; whilst that at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, "Islanders: The Making of the Mediterranean" (showing until 11th June), deals with the prehistory and ancient history of three of the Mediterranean's largest islands - Crete, Sardinia, and Cyprus.

As an islander myself (born and brought up on the Channel Island of Jersey, and having lived all but one year of my life on islands and archipelagoes, including the UK "mainland," on which I live today), I have an inevitable interest in such topics. Back in 1996, I published a book, Islands in Time: Island Sociogeography and Mediterranean Prehistory(Routledge). In it, I sought to adapt the long-standing "Theory of Island Biogeography," used by biologists around the world, to the very different data-sets of archaeology, and the study of human communities. Island Biogeography Theory makes use of physical variables, such as island size, and distance from adjacent mainlands, to understand the processes of colonisation of islands by animal and plant species, and the probability of their survival in an insular environment. It has long been understood that evolution on islands can produce "endemic" species that occur nowhere else, including, famously, the marine iguanas and giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands.

Summary diagram of Island Biogeography Theory, from B.H. Warren et al. 2015, in Ecology Letters 18, 200-217.

I was struck, in the 1990s, by possible archaeological corollaries of such phenomena, which I termed "cultural elaborations:" the Minoan "palaces" of Crete occur nowhere else in the Mediterranean; likewise the stone temples of Neolithic Malta; and the Bronze Age towers known as nuraghe, on Sardinia. On the other hand, as Mary Beard has pointed out in a contribution to the Fitzwilliam exhibition, islands, in archaeological terms, can be as much about "connectedness" as about isolation. The early 20th Century ethnographer, Bronislaw Malinowski, in his famous study (Argonauts of the Western Pacific) of elaborate exhange networks on the Trobriand Islands, to the north of Papua New Guinea, showed how such "connectedness" could be a medium for the emergence of social complexity in island communities.

The stone temple of Ggantija on Gozo, Malta, 3600-2500 BC. Photo: BoneA, Licensed under CCA.

Nuraghe Losa, Sardinia, 13th-14th Century BC. Photo: Elena at Italian Wikimedia (image is in the Public Domain).

Nuraghic bronze warrior figurines from Sardinia, 1000-700 BC. Photo: Prc90, Licensed under CCA.

Unsurprisingly, the case studies that I used in my 1996 book are, by any modern standard, thoroughly out of date, yet many of the same questions about island societies continue to suggest themselves. Geographically, of course, there is a world of difference between Crete, Cyprus, and Sardinia, on the one hand; and the true "oceanic" insularity of, say, the Galapagos, Easter Island, or even the Trobriand Islands, on the other. These, however, are differences of degree, rather than differences of kind.

The Oxford exhibition focusses specifically on the site of Knossos, on Crete, the largest and longest-enduring of the Minoan "palaces" of Crete. One of my students recently asked whether "palace" was really the most appropriate term for these extraordinary buildings. Neither he nor I could suggest a better term, but the problem is a real one: they were clearly, at least in part, residential complexes, and the principal residents must surely have belonged to an elite, but there is none of the abundant evidence for "kingship" that one finds in contemporary Mesopotamia (Iraq) or Egypt, until the very end of the "palatial period," when it seems to have been introduced by Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland.

The Palace of Knossos. Photo: Lapplaender, Licensed under CCA.

"Kamares Ware" pottery from Crete, c1800-1700 BC. This distinctive pottery seems to have been produced in workshops closely associated with the palaces themselves, but some vessels were exported, and have been found as far away as Egypt, attesting to Minoan Crete's "connectedness" to the wider world of the eastern Mediterranean. Photo: Bernard Gagnon, Licensed under CCA.

"Marine Style" ewer from Poros, Crete, 1500-1450 BC, on display at the Ashmolean Museum. This style seems to have emerged at Knossos in the aftermath of the destruction of Crete's other palaces, possibly as a result of a tsunami following the catastrophic eruption on the neighbouring island of Thera. Photo: Mark Patton, Licensed under CCA.

Whilst most of the objects on display at the Ashmolean come either from the museum's own collection, or from the Heraklion Museum on Crete, those on display at the Fitzwilliam are drawn from a wider range of collections, and vary, in date, from the time of the Mediterranean's first farming communities, more than ten thousand years ago, to the flourishing of Greek and Roman civilisation between the Fifth Centuries BC and AD.

Marble figurines from the Cycladic Islands, 2800-2000 BC, made, probably on the island of Naxos, and widely exhanged around the Aegean, probably before the age of sail. Photo: Sailko, Licensed under CCA.

There is a superabundance of extraordinary artefacts on display in both exhibitions, and questions are thrown up, to which, it seems, there are no more definitive answers available in 2023 than there were in 1996, although there are, incontestibly, more sites known, and more artefacts excavated and catalogued, and, thus, available to display.

For those, like myself, with an appetite for still more, both exhibitions are accompanied by a lively programme of events, and we have to hope that these will, in some way, be brought together and conserved as a permanent legacy of two exhibitions that I, for one, will not be forgetting any time soom.

Mark Patton is a published author of historical fiction and non-fiction, whose books can be purchased from Amazon.

New Windows into Prehistoric Life: Thoughts on "Britain's Pompeii"

A programme recently broadcast by the BBC (and still available, to UK viewers, at least, on I-Player until the end of August), provides a timely update on one of the most exciting archaeological excavations to have taken place on these islands during my lifetime. "Britain's Pompeii - A Village Lost in Time" charts the progress of excavations at Must Farm, Cambridgeshire, where a farmstead of the Late Bronze Age (c1000-800 BC) is being unearthed. The four circular buildings, built on a platform jutting out over a river, burned down (or may have been torched by an enemy), and collapsed directly into the water, allowing for unprecedented preservation of wood, fabric, and other organic materials. Progress can be followed on the project website.

Excavations at Must Farm. Photo: Dr Colleen Morgan (licensed under CCA).

Excavations at Must Farm. Photo: Dr Colleen Morgan (licensed under CCA).

Excavations at Must Farm. Photo: Dr Colleen Morgan (licensed under CCA).

In my novel, Undreamed Shores, the character of Arthmael (based on a real archaeological skeleton known as "the Amesbury Archer"), living at Durrington Walls, near Stonehenge, explains to my protagonist, Amzai, how he met his wife, Alaudina (the mother of Amzai's prospective bride, Nanti), in the fenlands of East Anglia:

" ... there are marshes that stretch for miles, and the people live on eels and duck, and strange plants that grow in the water, like reeds. It's easier to get around by boat than on foot in that place. That's where Nanti was born."

Later Arthmael speaks of his own, far more distant, homeland (analysis of the Amesbury Archer's teeth has shown that he grew up in central Europe):

"Arthmael told of his homeland, of the village where he had been born. It was built on wooden poles, set on the edge of a great lake, with two high mountains rising behind it, their summits covered by snow, even in the summer."

The place I had in mind was Lake Constance in Germany, where such settlements have indeed been found.

Reconstruction of a Bronze Age "pile-dwelling" on the shores of Lake Constance, Germany. Photo: Traveler100 (licensed under GNU).

The settlement at Must Farm is the first true "pile-dwelling" found in Britain, built in much the same way as the settlements around Lake Constance, and elsewhere in Germany, Switzerland and eastern France, but with circular, rather than rectangular, houses. The people who built it lived at least 1400 years after the Amesbury Archer (they might, perhaps, have been the 56-times-great-grandchildren of Alaudina's sister), yet, remarkably, they seem to have been enmeshed in a network of international contacts and exchange that had endured since his time. Artefacts found at Must Farm suggest that this network extended not only into central, but also into southern Europe: they include glass beads which may have been made in northern Italy.

It will be some considerable time before Must Farm reveals all of its secrets: excavation, which is still ongoing, is just the first stage in the research process. It will take much longer to analyse the food residues found in pottery bowls; the human and animal faeces discovered behind the houses; the carpentry techniques used to build the platform, and the houses themselves; the fragments of woven textiles that are emerging from the mud even as I write this post.

Already, however, there are some hints, which are changing the way in which we understand this period in Britain's history. The characters in Undreamed Shores neither ride horses nor use wheeled transport: the people who lived at Must Farm almost certainly did both (a wooden wheel is one of the most significant discoveries announced to date). Arthmael and Nanti wear clothes of fur, leather, and woven wool: the people of Must Farm seem to have been using another important resource - linen, made from flax - the earliest evidence for this on the British Isles. This is a subject on which I will have more to say in a later post, not least because this is an industry with which I have a tangible, and much more recent, familial connection.

Mark Patton's novels, Undreamed Shores, An Accidental King, and Omphalos, are published by Crooked Cat Publications, and can be purchased from Amazon. He is currently working on The Cheapside Tales, a London-based trilogy of historical novels.