Coastal highlands, the sea and dissident behaviour on the margins of society

Abstract

King’s thought-provoking paper raises a number of important issues regarding the archaeological record of banditry and rebellion. I will focus my remarks on a particular aspect of the challenges raised by the paper, namely the matter of topography and how close familiarity with it enabled renegades to engage in ‘asymmetrical’ forms of resistance against colonial powers. In King’s discussion, she focused on the reliance by South African herders on habitual refuges in the Maloti– Drakensberg highlands to evade the imposition of sedentary lifestyles by British authorities. In my research a similar dynamic concerns a reliance on the rugged coast of Rough Cilicia by the so-called Cilician pirates to resist Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean world between 139 and 67 B.C. Parallels between the two landscapes are evident, as are the highly mobile lifeways of the rebels in each instance. One of the more challenging questions for the Cilician example, however, concerns the precise role played by agropastoralists of the Cilician mainland in piratical disturbances along the coast. Were the pirates and the Cilician natives one and the same people, or did they represent a merger of interests between two wholly unrelated yet mutually supportive groups? Much like the Maloti–Drakensberg highlands, the rugged, 200-kilometre-long coast of Rough Cilicia (south coastal Turkey directly north of Cyprus) offered limited capacity for agricultural settlement. The shore rises from sea level to 2,000 metres elevation in less than 30 kilometres, with long stretches of the shore forming prohibitive walls of inaccessible coastline. Prior to the Roman era (67 B.C.–250 A.D.) the principal lifeway in Rough Cilicia consisted of transhumant agropastoralism. Remains of necropolis centers in the ‘midlands’ (c.500–900 metres elevation) indicate that tribal entities drove their herds into the highland meadows (c.1,500 metres elevation) during summer and returned them to the shore for slaughter, processing and winter grazing (Matei, Kansa and Rauh 2011). During their time in the highlands the animals would obtain four times the nutrients otherwise available on their trek. These midland ritual centres occupied a halfway point along the arduous route that was traversed twice a year and became logical places for herders to settle the sick and the infirm (Frachetti 2009). Confirmation of this pattern is available not only from the consistent placement of these ritual centres along the midlands, but also from an otherwise visible lack of permanent stone structures throughout the region prior to the conquest of Alexander the Great (c.333 B.C.). From the perspective of built landscapes, the most dominant influence was the Ptolemies of Egypt and Cyprus, who governed this rugged coast from c.301 to 197 B.C., securing the shore with stone-constructed fortresses and signal towers (the largest being the fortress at Korakesion – modern-day Alanya – constructed by Ptolemy I, c.309 B.C.; Rauh, Dillon and Rothaus 2013). Settlements which did exist at this time, such as Korakesion, were small, and often little more than moorages furnished by projecting promontories, natural embayments or lagunal river mouths. It needs to be stressed that the nature of ancient Mediterranean seaborne commerce, nonetheless, required negotiating this prohibitive coastline. Although ancient cargo ships were suitably capable of plying the open seas of the Mediterranean, the requirements