The first two treat the dramatic environmental and human changes in the 4,000 years after the end of the Ice Age and intriguing religious monuments constructed in various locales in the fourth and third millennia BC. The subsequent nine chapters follow chronologically, from 8000 BC to AD 1500. Another chapter, one on "Ships and Sailors", replete with pictures and diagrams of vessels, details such matters as pilotage and navigation and accounts of sailor adventurers, particularly Phoenicians. Vincent-and by its separate maritime systems-one from Ireland to the Loire and another from the Portuguese Tagus to Morocco-Cunliffe brings clarity to an otherwise unintelligible mass. In explaining this great swath through its peninsulas-those of lower Wales and Ireland, Cornwall, Devon, Brittany, and Iberian Galicia and Cape St. In the introductory chapters he examines ancient and modern legends and myths that fashioned an Atlantic mystique in "Between Land and Sea" and draws a matchless portrait in words, maps, and photographs of the ocean facade stretching from Greenland to Africa east of the Canaries.
Essentially, 10,000 years of ocean exposure fostered this interrelatedness, one of shared beliefs and values.Ĭunliffe demonstrates his interdisciplinary skills in introductory chapters on myth, archaeology, geography, and landscape history. His is a thesis that coastal peoples Celts, Bretons, and Galicians, to name a few from Iceland to Gibraltar had more in common with one another than they did with their inland kin. One would have thought that truly new ideas about presenting ancient and medieval history had played out long ago, but Cunliffe disproves that notion. (1) These settlements extend beyond the European periphery of the north Atlantic: they often comprise Caribbean, Latin American, and African peoples and are not infrequently linked by past traffic in slaves.Īlthough such an expanded view of the Atlantic is not Barry Cunliffe's book, it does point to the wondrous world that Facing the Ocean reveals to its readers.
$45/25 £).Īlthough late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century discoveries elevated the Atlantic to unanticipated geopolitical prominence, it has remained for present-day scholars to ponder as well the inter-connectedness of communities interfacing with this broad expanse of water. Retrieved from īy Barry Cunliffe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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