Prehistoric and Protohistoric Cyprus

This book provides a new island archaeology and island history of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Cyprus, set in its eastern Mediterranean context. By drawing out tensions between different ways of thinking about theoretical issues such as insularity and connectivity, ethnicity, migration, and hybridization, it addresses a dynamic new field of archaeological enquiry — the social identity of prehistoric and early historic Mediterranean islanders. The archaeological record of Cyprus during the centuries between about 2700–1000 BC — including architecture, the mortuary record, pottery, figurines,...

This book provides a new island archaeology and island history of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Cyprus, set in its eastern Mediterranean context. By drawing out tensions between different ways of thinking about theoretical issues such as insularity and connectivity, ethnicity, migration, and hybridization, it addresses a dynamic new field of archaeological enquiry — the social identity of prehistoric and early historic Mediterranean islanders. The archaeological record of Cyprus during the centuries between about 2700–1000 BC — including architecture, the mortuary record, pottery, figurines, seals and sealings, ivories, metalwork, and the broader Cypriot landscape — is presented. Using this material evidence, the book re‐evaluates from the postcolonial perspective of hybridization long‐standing notions about ethnicity, migration, and colonization on the island at the beginning and end of the Bronze Age, and concludes that the Cypriotes themselves provided the main impetus for social development and change on the island. By addressing directly the theoretical underpinnings of various interpretations of the material record, and by comparing and contrasting that record with all relevant documentary evidence, this book considers how a more contextualized, nuanced treatment of the motivations and practices involved in demographic movement, individual or group identification, cultural entanglement, and social change can help us to re‐present several complex aspects of the Cypriot past, and in turn bring them to bear upon Mediterranean archaeologies.