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354 Four Years of Corruption
settlements or farmsteads, scores of microregions. We therefore
eschewed the piling up of descriptions of individual estates or
territories and their fortunes—descriptions that might have
been drawn from field archaeology, from ancient inscriptions
or literary texts, or from the later documentary record. Where
we did display four localities as examples (chapter III), survey
contributed heavily and explicitly to our analysis. We note that
to do justice to the data of survey can be hard even for archaeologists:
a recent reviewer of a series on Mediterranean survey
speaks of ‘archaeological method . . . demoted to a kind of anthropological
geomorphology’. 15 His complaint is that by
adopting a tightly focused and environmentally orientated survey
technique, looking inwards at small areas, Mediterranean
survey archaeology elucidates large interaction less well than do
the techniques and models used by archaeologists working in
Asia and America, and does not amount to proper regional
analysis. We hope at least to have avoided such introversion.
On the archaeological front, our major regret is that Barry
Cunliffe’s Facing the Ocean, like McCormick’s monograph, was
not published either a little earlier than CS, so that we could
draw parallels and contrasts between his Atlantic world and our
Mediterranean, or a little later, so that Cunliffe could have
included some response to CS. Cunliffe’s mode of exposition
is different from our own. But we share a stress on the primacy
of responses to the sea and ease of communications across it as
combining to generate coherent zones throughout long
stretches of prehistory and history; and the European Atlantic
periphery, as Cunliffe maps it, is our western neighbour. In that
basic geographical sense, we are not in conflict. We wish only
that Cunliffe had gone further chronologically. It remains to
build bridges between Cunliffe’s archaeological vision, which
does not seek to elucidate periods more recent than 1500,
and the increasingly lively early modern historiography of the
Atlantic. 16
15 R. E. Blanton, ‘Mediterranean Myopia’, Antiquity 74 (2001), 629.
16 D. Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in id. and
M. J. Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke
and New York, 2002), 11–27; O. Ribeiro, Portugal, o Mediterrâneo e o Atlântico:
esboço de relações geográficas, 4th edn. (Lisbon, 1986).