• Iberia
• Navigation
• Sea
• Sea routes
• Sardinia
• Apulia
• Sicily
• Aegean
• Bronze Age
• Mediterranean

Since the Neolithic seafaring allowed people to move over long distances. The coasts all across the Great Sea were touched by groups of seafarers that using long boats and coastal cabotage ventured by sea looking for new settlements or obsidian and other raw materials.
During the III and first half of the II millennium BC sail navigation and innovations in naval technology rapidly developed in the eastern Mediterranean. This technical advance allowed to shorten distances, but lead seamanship to become a specialised task that required profound knowledge of the sea as an environment. Meteorology, oceanographic conditions and coastal morphology was necessary knowledge required to face the seascape. Most of this phenomenon was both fostered and exploited by the rising important local polities of the Bronze Age and the result was a high degree of connectivity within the eastern basin.
More fragmentary appears to be the picture of contemporary maritime connections in the central and western basins, the main areas of interest of this study. Here eastern naval technological innovations will not arrive until the second half of the millennium. However in the same time span as in the east, local more modest, sea routes, begin to emerge. These implied the crossing of large portions of open sea. Despite the risk this type of navigation, favoured the colonisation of remote islands and the spread of local cultures during the copper age, and by the Early Bronze Age some common cultural patterns can be recognised in different regions but overall seafaring remains relevant on a local scale.
By the second half of the II millennium BC these two realities began to be increasingly interconnected due to the opening of consistent long-range sea routes. From the XVII to the XII century BC, Aegean material culture and influences spread in the west all along these new sea routes. These were far from static and changed and evolved both in extension and in location of key nodes, leaving conspicuous amounts of traces behind.
Starting from these traces, this work aims to investigate the sea routes that emerged during the Bronze Age for navigating in the central and western Mediterranean, how these evolved and expanded throughout the centuries, and what type of contacts and interconnections arose due to these maritime voyages, their nature and their intensity.
Furthermore a diachronic study will be attempted by comparing the knowledge acquired on the sea routes of the Bronze Age with the routes and evidences of the Iron Age. The aim of this second part of the study would be to investigate the possible existence of trends and patterns in the choice and drawing of sea routes, surviving in later periods.