A novel cross-cultural exploration of how maritime peoples have engaged with the sea through cosmology, spirituality, and ritual
 
“Offers a wealth of information about maritime phenomena, rituals, beliefs, and cultic practices of maritime peoples. McNiven skillfully incorporates quotations and references from a wide range of sources, including ancient historical records, ethnographic data, early archaeological and ethnohistorical studies, and modern research in related fields.”—Andrej Gaspari, University of Ljubljana  
 
“McNiven uses numerous case studies that provide cross-cultural comparisons and a wide range of interdisciplinary sources that support his analysis, demonstrating the complexity and uniqueness in how maritime cultures envisioned the oceans and also how these various cultures expressed views that revealed similarities around the globe.”—Amy Mitchell-Cook, author of A Sea of Misadventures: Shipwreck and Survival in Early America  
 
Sentient Seas offers a global perspective on maritime cultures, examining how societies across time and space have understood and interacted with the sea. Synthesizing archaeological evidence, historical documents, and ethnographic accounts, Ian McNiven explores maritime traditions from ancient civilizations in the Middle East and Mediterranean to medieval Europe and Scandinavia to contemporary Indigenous communities in the South Pacific.
 
McNiven investigates diverse cultural practices including shipbuilding, the treatment of shipwrecks and shipwreck victims, and maritime resource use, interpreting the evidence through the perspectives of mariners who understood the seas to be sentient and capable of acting with intentionality. He introduces the concepts of “terrestrial seascapes” and “ontological switching” to illustrate how land-based shrines and votive offerings extend maritime cosmologies and maintain a liminal transition from land to sea. By bridging anthropological and archaeological research with transdisciplinary blue humanities scholarship, Sentient Seas approaches seas as spiritscapes, recontextualizing folkloric beliefs about maritime superstitions.  
 
Ian J. McNiven is professor of Indigenous archaeology at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre at Monash University in Melbourne. He is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea.  
 
A volume in the series Society and Ecology in Island and Coastal Archaeology, edited by Victor D. Thompson and Scott M. Fitzpatrick

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