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110 Ecology and Beyond
littoral does not mean that there was no connectivity and that
the Atlantic peoples were self-sufficient and closed communities.
It must be assumed that as early as the fourth and third
millennia bc a dense network of exchange of rare raw materials
developed from Shetland down to Morocco. Axes, first made of
stone, then of bronze, were a prominent exchange item and
were widely circulated. Displaying a large quantity of axes
obviously was a privilege of the ‘Atlantic elites’. The exchange
of some more common commodities has left no archaeological
trace but is likely to have been no less active. Beliefs and cultural
attitudes also travelled from one place to another. But the most
striking feature of this ‘Atlantic civilization’ is precisely its
homogeneity and stability over time. The predictable environment
of the Atlantic peoples did not force them to engage in the
general process of connectivity that for Mediterranean communities
was vital.
Another difference in the form of connectivity is worth
stressing. Whereas Mediterranean societies, as early as the
Bronze Age, experienced regional navigation embracing a
whole sub-zone of the Mediterranean, a process that culminated
in a general connectivity in the first millennium, it seems
that a simple overlapping of purely local and restricted circuits
characterized connectivity in the Atlantic. Even in the Roman
period, when the greater part of it came under the authority of
one single power, the Atlantic littoral was not a zone of general
and autonomous circulation. The Roman amphorae of Dressel
IA type that reached Brittany in the first century, before
Caesar’s conquest, came through the isthmus of Gascony. 44
Even at that time, the western littoral of Europe did not transform
itself into a large commercial highway. The existence
of the lighthouse of La Coruña proves that some traffic took
place on these coasts, but the main way to Britain from the
Mediterranean started from Massilia, used the Rhône, then
the Scheldt or Rhine valley, and finally crossed over the
North Sea, as is proved among others by the diffusion of
Dressel 30 amphorae. 45
44
B. Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and its Peoples (Oxford,
2001), 389.
45
Ibid. 418–19.