| Summary: | The maritime dimension of the different cultures which archaeological research has defined over the years on the shores of the Mediterranean is often considered one of the most interesting elements for understanding how people moved around the Mediterranean basin during ancient times. Particularly for prehistory the need for a better investigation of the naval and nautical dimension of ancient peoples appears nowadays to be extremely urgent due to a lack of information about the Western Mediterranean that determined the birth of a diffusionist theory in accordance with the now surpassed ex oriente lux-theory. The recent development of naval archaeology as a proper discipline, and not just as a branch of maritime archaeology or commercial history, allows us to adopt a new paradigm. The possibility to examine a good number of wrecks as well as the naval iconography of the Mediterranean in the light of the knowledge we have about ancient naval technology is the base of our capability to propose a new interpretation of both the origins and the development of the ancient maritime networks that linked all peoples living around the Mediterranean coasts during the Bronze Age. On the one hand, the study of ancient ships and naval structures permits us to recognise different local traditions that originated in different places as well as to follow their development over the centuries. Further, by tracing their key elements we are able to recognise how and when some of these different traditions started to overlap or disappeared. On the other hand, the analysis of the nautical dimension of the different “cultures” of the Mediterranean, including their maritime commercial activities, nautical technology and wider relationship with the sea, permits us to recognise how, when and why we can start speaking about Levantine and Aegean maritime supremacy in the West. Far from proposing a complete interpretation of these phenomena, this paper will point to the role naval archaeology can play in the study of cultural interactions in the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age. The main aim is to pose some new questions in order to surpass the utilitaristic misuse of the naval dimension of ancient Mediterranean peoples that lived around the Mediterranean shores. This is often at the base of many misinterpretations of the naval role of the great eastern realms as well as of the small local communities of the West.
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