Revised edition of The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World published

This revised edition contains an extended new Preface in which Cyprian highlights some of the game-changing developments that have emerged in the meantime. Startling evidence from all around the basin now suggests a much more complex patterning and chronology for the spread of hominins and modern humans, and new perspectives on the role of the Mediterranean as a theatre of evolutionary interaction and behavioural plasticity.

New fieldwork in North Africa, including at the site of Oued Beht, where a Cambridge-based team collaborates with Italian and Moroccan colleagues, is finally starting to illuminate the distinctive ways of life, social communities and human agency of those who lived on the southern side of the sea west of Egypt during later prehistory, as well as their interactions with Iberia.

And last but far from least, a range of archaeological sciences continue to shed fresh light on almost every aspect of early Mediterranean life, most spectacularly in the form of remarkable genetic insights into long-suspected but previously largely unproven patterns of human mobility in and around the sea and coasts.

As Cyprian puts it, "2013 was sadly a critical few years too early to garner and incorporate reliable insights from the recent biomolecular and specific genomic revolution, but what a staggering difference eleven years makes in this fast-moving field. I look forward to seeing how much of the book’s original interpretive edifice survives the next decade or two."

The book is available to purchase from Thames and Hudson online.