On the Ocean with Barry Cunliffe

This was the talk I'd been most excited about when I got my Festival programme. Barry Cunliffe was a big name in archaeology when I was in college, and he's written several good books over the years.
We were in the Oxfam Moot tent, one of the biggest venues - and before we went in staff were taking some of the fixed panels out of the walls so there would be a breeze. At last the weather had turned hot and sunny.
This was a lecture, with slides, picking out some of the stories from the book, from the very earliest beginnings of seafaring in the Mediterranean. Recent research has pushed this date back to 130,000 years ago, after a field survey on Crete (I think) found hand axes datable to that period. Previously it was thought that nobody got to those islands before about 10,000 years ago.
One interesting snippet of information was that archaeologists can tell whether people got to an island and stayed there, or whether they went back and forth to the mainland, by the skeletons of mice. If the mice came with a human population which stayed on the island, then the mouse population would drift, genetically, from the mainland population. If there was constant travel between the two, new mice would constantly be arriving, stowed away in cargo, so the populations would remain the same.
At the end of the lecture, a chap stood up to ask a question in the audience and said that he had been involved in researching mice on islands, and gave Barry Cunliffe a bit of information that he hadn't previously known, about an island off the coast of Ireland. The mice there had similar DNA to the mice on mainland Ireland - but the fleas came from Southern Spain!
Another story, and the place Barry Cunliffe got his book title from, was of the voyages of Pytheas, a Greek explorer who had circumnavigated Britain and either went to Iceland or met people who had and wrote down their stories. The impetus for these voyages was to find a source of tin that the Greeks could access, as the Phoenicians had cut off their access to the source they had been using, in Spain.
And then there were the Viking journeys that led to the coast of Newfoundland. Columbus was really a late comer to the continent of America - even Bristol fishermen were ahead of him. Here we learned about latitude sailing, by which ships can travel in a straight line by measuring the distance of the sun above the horizon at noon, or of several stars at night, out of sight of land, instead of hugging the coasts.
And it's worth mentioning that all the maps in the book look unusual because north is not at the top. Barry Cunliffe said that the direction of sunset would be of more interest to an early sailor, so all the maps are oriented with west at the top.
He also spoke about Phoenicians, and later Portuguese, traders and explorers heading down the coast of Africa. There's an island at the mouth of a big river in Senegal, Port St. Louis, that may well have Phoenician archeology under the modern town, but no digs have ever been done there.
He also mentioned St Brendan the Navigator, who headed out to sea to put himself into the hands of his God - the exploration was of his own mind as much as the wonders that they came across in the journeys.
He also spoke about the delight of being an archaeologist - that a new dig could unearth new evidence that completely changed the story we thought we knew, such as the hand axes that changed the entire timeline of seafaring in the Mediterranean.
I was delighted at having the opportunity to listen to a really good archaeologist give a lecture - and that I recognised quite a bit of what he was saying.