This preface to the 'Oceans of Archaeology' volume bids welcome to a vast submerged prehistoric world that, as yet, is unfamiliar to most people. The chapter outlines the book’s background and defines its scope and content. The submerged cultural heritage of the European and eastern Mediterranean countries presented in the book is of a richness and diversity so far unmatched anywhere else on the globe. It results from the systematic and far-sighted efforts that generations of enthusiasts, both professionals and amateurs, have invested in collecting, surveying and recording.

This lecture was given at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology (Brown University) on April 30, 2018. The topic is a condensed version of the 2017 book "Black Ships and Sea Raiders: The Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Context of Odysseus' Second Cretan Lie" (Lanham: Lexington): https://www.academia.edu/35561019/Black_Ships_and_Sea_Raiders_The_Late_Bronze_and_Early_Iron_Age_Context_of_Odysseus_Second_Cretan_Lie

The Maritime Archaeology Outreach Project (MAOP) 2019 is an outreach project carried out by a team from the Alexandria Centre for Maritime Archaeology & Underwater Cultural Heritage and generously funded by the Honor Frost Foundation. The MAOP seeks to raise the profile of maritime archaeology in Egypt by targeting children at different venues and events. This article aims to introduce MAOP's outreach activities and discuss the preliminary results.

Historical accounts indicate pirates were able to create culturally mixed tribal entities and identities by incorporating new followers from different cultures into their social structure. This article suggests that upheavals at the end of the Bronze Age inter alia led to the formation of pirate bands of ‘Sea Peoples’ composed of non-elites, including sailors, disenfranchised warriors, mercenaries, workers, craft workers and peasants from the Mediterranean social network. We discuss how historical accounts of piracy may enable us to model the Sea Peoples’ phenomenon through the identification of patterns in pirate culture including social organization and geography and we suggest that piracy was a mechanism for limited migration and transmission of foreign cultural traits. One tribe of these blended cultures, the Peleset, settled among the indigenous Canaanites, forming a new entity, the Philistines. We propose that their leaders assumed the Luwian title tarwanis (seren) or military leader, indicative of their tumultuous past.