Permeable boundaries in the late 3rd millennium BC Central Mediterranean. Contacts and mobility between the Balkans, Greece, Southern Italy and Malta

The relationships between the Aegean and the central Mediterranean during the second half of the 3rd millennium BC have been recently discussed by J. Maran and other scholars, who have focussed their attention particularly on Greece and the Balkans yet highlighting the connections between these regions and southern Italy, Sicily and the Maltese archipelago. Nonetheless some issues remain to be examined in more detail. Firstly, the chronological framework of the different areas involved in this phenomenon as well as the time-scale of these connections has yet to be refined. Secondly, relationships between each region probably differed depending on specific cultural, economic and social traits of the various human groups participating in the process. Therefore local socio-economic contexts should be carefully evaluated in order to figure out the impact these connections had on their specific historic trajectories. On the basis of the advances in researches in the central Mediterranean, we will analyse this phenomenon and its implications from a ‘western’ perspective. We will take into consideration in particular the southern Italian regions, Sicily and the small central Mediterranean archipelagos where traces of contacts with the 3rd millennium BC Greece and Balkans occur. When this phenomenon began each of these regions was undergoing specific cultural developments. Then, at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC, they appear to ‘have taken the same road’, enhancing transmarine exchange. Therefore the question is: to what extent did contacts with the eastern Mediterranean stimulate or influence this historic process? By comparing and contrasting these areas, we may highlight their peculiarities and single out the different trajectories they followed over the second half of the 3rd millennium BC. Archaeological evidence of these contacts is mainly constituted by the spread of a distinctive pottery style that marked the Dalmatian Cetina culture and of further singular artefacts, such as the bossed bone plaques. We are inclined to think that small human groups coming from the Balkans and the Peloponnese were responsible for the ‘dissemination’ of these features and, at the same time, of new ideologies and economic strategies. Nonetheless, differences can be noticed between the involvement of coastal/insular sites and inland centres as well as between settlement and funerary contexts. Furthermore, we can draw a comparison between cultural spheres where Aegean/Balkans traits appear to have become representative and those situations where these traits remained circumscribed. Finally, it seems now clear that contacts happened at different times. Thus, we will try to assess the chronological framework in which relationships took place. Two distinct phases have been defined as regards the Peloponnese and these appear to apply also to the case of the Maltese archipelago. Conversely, the chronology of Sicily and southern Italy remains less determinable as yet, though these regions too appear to have been reached by small eastern groups at different stages.