This can be positive in that it introduces you to a great deal of information in a structured manner, it can be negative in that the writing style becomes formulaic and unengaging and also that the amount of information is unsatisfying. It has certain strong elements of undergraduate reading matter. That said, I can always find something to critique:Īround about the second chapter I had developed a strong suspicion that this book was designed as a text book.

It begins with a description of the coastal zones facing the Atlantic, it then covers the basics of tides, shipping sailors and prehistoric changes in geographic contours. The time period it covers is 8000 BC to 1500 AD and generally, it makes fascinating reading. This book is about the Atlantic ocean and how the peoples living on its coast line developed distinct identities based on the ocean and its influence of their culture. It will send shock waves through the history world and will radically change our view of the European past. Cunliffe culls the archaeological evidence to illuminate the bonds that developed and intensified between these isolated communities and helped to maintain a shared and distinctive Atlantic identity.Īttractively designed and vibrantly written, Facing the Ocean offers a striking reassessment of a people who have usually been regarded as peripheral to European history. Their profound relationship with the ocean set these communities apart from their inland countryman, creating a distinct Atlantic culture.

These peoples lived at the edge of the world, in places called Land's End, Finistere, and Finisterra, and looked out on a bountiful but terrifying expanse of ocean, a roiling, merciless infinity beyond which there was nothing. He argues that the peoples of the Atlantic rim-of Iceland, Scotland, Ireland, Brittany, Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar-all share a cultural identity shaped by the Atlantic Ocean, an identity which stretches back almost ten thousand years. In Facing the Ocean, Barry Cunliffe, one of the world's most highly regarded authorities on prehistoric Europe, offers an utterly original way of looking at that continent. Even today, the Bretons see themselves as distinct from the French, but refer to the Irish, Welsh, and Galicians as their brothers and cousins. These maritime communities have long looked north and south along the coast, not inland, to claim a common bond.

The Bretons are not French, the Celts are not English, and the Galicians are not Spanish, writes Barry Cunliffe.

Barry cunliffe facing the ocean