The Strait of Gibraltar, at the crossroads of seas and continents (classical and medieval periods) – DETROIT

The Strait of Gibraltar has shown itself a theater of essential stakes in recent years. The Strait appeared in the 1990s as an ideal passage for African populations forced to migrate and for those who specialized in smuggling them to their new lives. European and Spanish measures to curtail these activities have since shifted the migratory flow westwards. Nevertheless, tensions persist surrounding the Strait, and debates concerning migratory phenomena, largely played out in the media, have had a profound mobilizing effect on the social sciences. In this very particular intellectual and social context, research by specialists of earlier historical periods has been limited. This, despite the fact that the Strait’s spatial singularities, as they play out in contemporary events, were understood and confronted even in Antiquity. Our program proposes a reexamination of this territory over the longue durée, taking into account Phoenician and Punic precedents, but concentrating in earnest on the period from the Second Punic War (third century B.C.E.) to the first waves of European expansion into North Africa (fourteenth-fifteenth centuries). The narrowness of the Strait from North to South ensures its essential role as a point of passage for regional traffic. However, although resolving the breach created by this opening from the Mediterranean onto the Ocean was not an obstacle, it did lead to certain spatial constraints that native populations had to bypass or overcome. From East to West, the Strait functions as a port, in general crossed from the Sea towards the Ocean. The ambiguity of the spatial framework once again comes through here: systems grew around the possibilities for circulation, but the difficulty of understanding what lay beyond the passage, despite ambitious early exploration of the Atlantic coast, as well as the technical difficulties presented by navigating in an unfamiliar physical setting, complicated efforts to cross this threshold. In our area of study, the relation between territory and the societies within is thus particularly complex. Natural constraints combine with psychological and technical aspects that are sometimes difficult to understand for earlier periods. The social dimensions (which include economic practices and government) also reveal particularities worthy of attention: though integral parts of the same political and administrative space for centuries (Roman world and Berber “empires”), the shores were also seen, sometimes even simultaneously, as the limits of two opposing worlds, separated during the Middle Ages by the clash between Christianity and Islam. The ambition of our program lies in the project of collecting our knowledge concerning his zone, plentiful but segmented, and to resituate it in a broader, longue durée context, likewise innovating how we approach this information through recent advances concerning spatial analysis in the social sciences. Digital tools will also play an important role, especially since we intend to create an online atlas, built conjunctively with databases gradually augmented and enriched with archeological and textual information concerning this area. More than ever, the need to remove barriers between academic disciplines is indispensable: historians and archeologists have much to learn from geographers, anthropologists and political scientists in matters concerning population movement and the relation with territory. Finally, the research team will be international, with participating researchers from Morocco, Portugal, Spain and France.