Reconstructing a Maritime Past argues that rather than applying geo-ethnic labels to shipwrecks to describe "Greek" or "Roman" seafaring, a more intriguing alternative emphasizes a maritime culture's valorization of the Mediterranean Sea. Doing so creates new questions and research agendas to understand the past human relationship with the sea.This study makes this argument in three sections. Chapters 1 and 2, contrasting intellectual histories of maritime archaeological interpretive approaches common in Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, propose that the former perspective - which embodies contemporary and fluid perceptions of culture - is a better theoretical framework for future research. Chapters 3-5 re-interpret the corpus of submerged sites in the Mediterranean Sea with this approach, arguing that this dataset does not represent "Phoenician," "Muslim," or
