Michael Given

The Sydney Cyprus survey project : social approaches to regional archaeological survey

The Sydney Cyprus Survey Project (SCSP) devoted five seasons of fieldwork (1992-1997) to an intensive archaeological survey in the north-central foothills of the Troodos Mountains on the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus. The survey covered 65 square kilometres in and around the modern villages of Politiko and Mitsero. This pathbreaking project examined the relationship between the production and distribution of agricultural and metallurgical resources. Additionally, the project provides new insights into the interpretation and collection of regional archaeological data. The volume represents an integrated approach to the discussion of social landscapes--from archaeological, historical, geomorphological, geobotanical, and archaeometallurgical perspectives--within the SCSP survey universe. The twenty-two contributors to this volume provide a comprehensive data set including lithics, pottery, site types, and radiocarbon dates. Full colour GIS maps provide a wealth of information on pottery densities and site distributions. This well-illustrated monograph will serve as a model for future research throughout the region.

Maps, Fields, and Boundary Cairns: Demarcation and Resistance in Colonial Cyprus

An important component of the administration and control of a colony by an external power is the demarcation and classification of the land and its people. This was certainly the case in Cyprus under British colonial rule (1878–1960), as three case studies demonstrate: the topographical survey of the island by H. H. Kitchener in 1878–83; the cadastral survey of 1909–29; and the work of the Forest Delimitation Commission from 1881 to 1896. This was not achieved without resistance on a variety of levels. Ironically, part of the opposition came from the structure of the colonial demarcation and classification project itself.

The Sydney Cyprus Survey Project: An Interdisciplinary Investigation of Long-Term Change in the North Central Troodos, Cyprus

AbstractThe Sydney Cyprus Survey Project (SCSP) began work in the north central Troodos Mountains of Cyprus in 1992. The aim of the project is to examine the relationships among the exploitation of natural resources (especially copper mining and agriculture), the development of complex social systems, and the changes taking place in the physical landscape. This interim report puts our fieldwork and interpretation into the context of contemporary regional survey practice, and describes our approaches to methodological problems such as sampling strategies, analytical units, and field walking techniques. We present an integrated discussion of two specific areas of interest and an overview of the main results and conclusions of the project to date.

Agriculture, Settlement and Landscape in Ottoman Cyprus

Abstract The Ottoman period in Cyprus (1571–1878) has a wealth of archaeological material and relevant documentation, which is only now beginning to be exploited. After giving a brief overview of this data and its historical background this article explores the relationship between agriculture settlement and landscape during this period. Particularly relevant are the different types of rural site: villages, seasonal settlements, estates, monasteries, goat folds, field shelters, and water mills. An examination of this material in its landscape context allows an analysis of human activities within the landscape, such as settlement, travel, and labour, and the social and political relations that influenced them.

Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project, Cyprus: Report on the 2001 Season

Abstract This report summarises the first field season of interdisciplinary field survey in the northern Troodos mountains in Cyprus. The overall objective of the project is to integrate intensive archaeological and geomorphological survey with a range of other analytical techniques, in order to understand the relationship between human activity and the environment. Particular focuses of the 2001 season included an area of Roman copper production and habitation; the mountainous Asinou area during the Medieval to Modern periods; and the fertile Karkotis Valley with its long history of cultivation and settlement. All areas were examined in the context of survey transects sampling the broader landscape at all periods.

Mining Landscapes and Colonial Rule in Early-Twentieth-Century Cyprus

In the early 20th century the large-scale copper and asbestos mines of Cyprus were intimately associated with colonial rule, both in their ideologies and in their actual operations. For the Cypriot miners, this represented a major disruption of long-standing values and required a new negotiation of their relationship with their British colonizers. Attempts to control mining landscapes and communities interplayed with a range of actions from submission to everyday resistance to strikes and riots. These dynamics are most clearly seen by examining the entire landscape. Particularly revealing aspects include the naming of mining landscapes, the surveillance of miners, the complex relationship between mining and agriculture, the actual and symbolic manipulation of artifacts, the expression of control and resistance in miners’ housing, and shifting concepts of community.

Landholding and landscape in Ottoman Cyprus

In Ottoman Cyprus (1571–1878), social organization was based above all on the ownership and exploitation of agricultural land. The social relations, economic processes and daily practices of landowning elites and peasant farmers alike were structured by their relationship with the land. In this article, historical and archaeological data are integrated in order to investigate the development of social organization by focusing on landholding and landscape. In particular, it examines the role, identity and material culture of the new Cypriot/Ottoman elite, the commercialization of agriculture as expressed in the economy and the landscape, and the daily routine experiences of communities in the landscape.

Conviviality and the Life of Soil

Soils provide a striking demonstration of conviviality, thanks to the intensity and abundance of lively interaction seething within them. Soils constitute and generate life precisely through the symbiotic interaction, collaboration and competition of an enormous range of partners. Engaging with some specific soils in central Cyprus demonstrates how this conviviality works. Soil-places are created by very precise combinations of soil players, both non-human and human. Humans can join these partners in helping the soil to grow, through constructions of check dams to catch sediments and moisture. They can use soil to construct houses, demonstrating deep local knowledge and close partnership with the soils, and often recognizing the conviviality that provides a foundation for their lives in the landscape. As our soils today are catastrophically degraded and lost, the need to engage with the conviviality of soil is all the more urgent.

Review of 'The The Ecology of Coexistence and Conflict in Cyprus: Exploring the Religion, Nature, and Culture of a Mediterranean Island', by I. Dietzel

Is there a link between a balanced relationship with the environment and the peaceful co-existence of communities such as Greek and Turkish Cypriots? What happens when long-standing patterns of using natural resources are disrupted by forces such as colonialism, modernization and land reform? Could this loss of ecological balance have been be a catalyst for what is, on the face of it, a nationalist, ethnic and religious conflict in Cyprus? Irene Dietzel addresses these challenging questions in an interdisciplinary and ambitious book, the result of her PhD for the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Erfurt. In doing so she ranges widely across environmental philosophy, eco-theology, history, archaeology, anthropology and folk religion. The foundation of Dietzel’s argument is a thorough discussion and literature review of the theoretical background (Part I). Her overall approach aims to use environmental philosophy and cognitive theory to come to an integrated understanding of how people and the environment co-evolve. Local culture and popular religion are derived from the ‘architecture of the human mind’, and develop as people think and act in specific environments (p. 37). In Part II these theories are used to explore the ‘ecology of co-existence’ in Ottoman Cyprus. Greek and Turkish Cypriot (along with smaller Maronite, Armenian and Latin) communities co-operated extensively in their agricultural labour. They managed scarce resources together, they paid tithes as complete villages, rather than as families or ethnic/religious communities, and they interacted on common land and in fields held in multiple ownership (Chapter 6). Such relationships were directly supported by their local culture, which was itself adapted closely to the opportunities and constraints of the local environment, such as climatic micro-zones, marginal rainfall, and patchy arable land. These ecological strategies provided considerable resilience to environmental and social pressures, and were further enhanced by Ottoman property law and inheritance customs. Religion plays an important role here, at both an institutional and a popular level. Both the Orthodox Church and the Vakf, the Islamic system of charitable trusts, showed extensive knowledge and understanding of the local environment. This enabled them to conserve natural resources such as water, arable land and pasture, rather than just extracting short-term economic benefits from their assets. Similarly, folk religious practices — for example saints’ cults associated with holy trees or springs— can provide powerful protection for scarce natural resources, though Dietzel is careful not to assume any automatic ‘ecological felicity’ on the part of indigenous peoples or communities long-embedded in their landscape (p. 126). Syncretic practices, where such local rituals are enacted by people of different religions, are a direct result of a shared environmental context: they have an evident function and relevance to everyone engaged with that environment, regardless of their ethnic affiliation or religion (p. 136). The breakdown of these local cultural and environmental relations, Dietzel argues, can be the catalyst for an ‘ecology of conflict’, the subject of Part III of the book. Colonialism played a major role here, most clearly in the forestry delimitation of the 1880s and 1890s which excluded villagers from a wide range of long-standing practices within the forests. Across the 20th century, the key issue was the transformation of property from inherited, often dispersed smallholdings, which gave a strong sense of place to those who worked them, to a modern real-estate market dependent on large farms managed by contractors. These deprived most inhabitants of agricultural experience and the consequent sense of place. Along with the related phenomenon of urbanization, this was both a catalyst for the bi-communal conflict of the 1960s, leading up to the Turkish invasion of 1974, and was exacerbated by it. Refugees were of course uprooted from the land and environment that they had been part of, often for generations. As well as this, Dietzel argues, these events mark the culmination of a much longer process of disembedding people from their localities, both cultural and environmental (p. 151). The long experience of foreign ideologies and regulations concerning how local people should use and

Review of: 'Crossroads and Boundaries: The Archaeology of Past and Present in the Malloura Valley, Cyprus', edited by M.K. Toumazou, P.N. Kardulias, and D.B. Counts (2011)

The Athienou Archaeological Project has been carrying out excavation, survey and a wide range of analytical and community engagement activities in the Malloura Valley in central Cyprus since 1990. This engaging and very readable book provides detailed summaries and preliminary analyses of all of this very varied work. Because each chapter gives a careful explanation of the period background, the Cypriot context and the history of research, the book as a whole serves as an up-to-date and wide-ranging introduction to the archaeology of Cyprus, which links the broader picture to a close engagement with a specific landscape.This is the last of four volumes reporting the excavations of the Hebrew University at Tel BethShean between 1989 and 1996 and deals predominantly with the Early Bronze Age (EBA) remains. The book will interest scholars for two main reasons. Firstly the recovery of Building MA, a large, wellpreserved EB IB structure provides valuable data on the social and economic organization of late 4th millennium BC communities. Secondly, the stratified sequence of deposits dating to what has been conventionally termed EB III should aid our understanding of the appearance and development of the distinctive Khirbet Kerak Ware (KKW). Discussion of stratigraphy and structural evidence takes up around 20% of the volume, with one chapter allocated to the EB I period and another to EB III. The chapters are clear and concise and supported by lists of loci and walls, with non-ceramic finds tabulated by locus. The EB IB occupation appears to fall late in the period and consists of two phases of Building MA, a substantial multi-room structure dating to the late 4th millennium BC which the excavators interpret plausibly as a substantial residential/storage complex, perhaps associated with a large household or kinship group. It should therefore provide evidence on the nature of valley communities in the period just before, or contemporary with, the appearance of walled settlements. The EB III occupation, defined by the presence of KKW, encompasses several phases of domestic structures. A little over half of the volume is devoted to a discussion of ceramics. The EB IB pottery is presented according to a clearly defined type series. The descriptions are easy to follow and are linked closely to the figures. Each vessel category is described, quantified and some parallels are listed. Quantitative data is presented by stratum, and reveals considerable similarity between the assemblages from both phases of Building MA (M-3 and M-2). Each was dominated by storage vessels, with holemouth jars easily the most numerous form. The material is classified into three broad fabric groups mainly on the size and type of mineral inclusions, although no petrographic analysis was undertaken. There is a lot of useful information here, and a comparison with other contemporary settlements might have been revealing, although such discussion is limited. The assemblage is presented as being a mainly local industry, although differentiated from EB IA assemblages by the use of the tournette and of increasing co-ordination between form and fabric: it is therefore positioned as a step on the road to the greater specialization detectable in EB II. The presence of small quantities of both Grey Burnished Ware (which is typical of north Palestinian EB IA) and Metallic Ware, the presence of which has traditionally defined EB II in northern Palestine, suggests a date towards the end of EB IB, something that is confirmed by the radiometric evidence which would place the assemblage in the final centuries of the 4th millennium cal BC. As the authors note, the site appears to show an occupational gap during EB II, at least as this period has traditionally been understood: a similar situation has been documented at Tell esh-Shuna on the east side of the valley. Discussion of the EB III pottery is spread over three chapters, each separately authored and making rather different points. The basic presentation by ZivEduri is organized in the same way as the account of the EB I ceramics and underlines the contrast between vessels produced in the ‘local’ and KKW traditions. The former dominates production of storage vessels, and while some bowl and platter forms are produced in this tradition, most serving wares were made in KKW. While the sequence begins with a phase (R-12) that lacks KKW, it is not clear whether this is a genuine pre-KKW episode, or simply the result of a small sample. Quantitative data from Phases R-11 through R-7b indicate that vessels in both traditions were in use in significant quantities throughout the sequence. While there is little evidence for a clear typological development throughout the period of KKW production, the presence of hybrid vessels (e.g. bowl and platter forms familiar from the ‘local’ repertory, but produced using KKW