The ninth to the fifth centuries BCE saw a series of significant historical transformations across Cyprus, especially in the growth of towns and in developments in the countryside. In this book, Catherine Kearns argues that changing patterns of urban and rural sedentism drove social changes as diverse communities cultivated new landscape practices. Climatic changes fostered uneven relationships between people, resources like land, copper, and wood, and increasingly important places like rural sanctuaries and cemeteries. Bringing together a range of archaeological, textual, and scientific evidence, the book examines landscapes, environmental history, and rural practices to argue for their collective instrumentality in the processes driving Iron Age political formations. It suggests how rural households managed the countryside, interacted with the remains of earlier generations, and created gathering spaces alongside the development of urban authorities. Offering new insights into landscape archaeologies, Dr Kearns contributes to current debates about society's relationships with changing environments.

The ninth to the fifth centuries BCE saw a series of significant historical transformations across Cyprus, especially in the growth of towns and in developments in the countryside. In this book, Catherine Kearns argues that changing patterns of urban and rural sedentism drove social changes as diverse communities cultivated new landscape practices. Climatic changes fostered uneven relationships between people, resources like land, copper, and wood, and increasingly important places like rural sanctuaries and cemeteries. Bringing together a range of archaeological, textual, and scientific evidence, the book examines landscapes, environmental history, and rural practices to argue for their collective instrumentality in the processes driving Iron Age political formations. It suggests how rural households managed the countryside, interacted with the remains of earlier generations, and created gathering spaces alongside the development of urban authorities. Offering new insights into landscape archaeologies, Dr Kearns contributes to current debates about society's relationships with changing environments.

The question of how to define the territories of the ancient polities (city-kingdoms) of Iron Age Cyprus is a fascinating, but also a very difficult one. While this topic has already been widely explored by previous scholarship, recent investigations that include both modern approaches, such as the application of landscape archaeological methodologies, as well as a re-evaluation of the available archaeological evidence from a new perspective, now offers a fresh take on such questions. A workshop organized in Berlin in 2018 aimed at discussing additional information on the topography of the ancient city of Idalion and its hinterland. This volume therefore includes unique contributions that deal with a wide array of relevant aspects. They provide new information on the location, chronology and character of settlements, necropoleis and sanctuaries from the wider area of Idalion, and discuss important issues such as the continuity or discontinuity of settlement activities from the (Late) Bronze Age to the Iron Age and how this is reflected by material culture. They address questions concerned with the physical control of territories and communication networks by considering Idalion’s resource availability and the overall development of its rural settlement pattern in contrast to that of its neighbouring polities.

In this gripping sequel to his bestselling 1177 B.C., Eric Cline tells the story of what happened after the Bronze Age collapsed—why some civilizations endured, why some gave way to new ones, and why some disappeared forever “A landmark book: lucid, deep, and insightful. . . . You cannot understand human civilization and self-organization without studying what happened on, before, and after 1177 B.C.”—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, bestselling author of The Black Swan At the end of the acclaimed history 1177 B.C., many of the Late Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean lay in ruins, undone by invasion, revolt, natural disasters, famine, and the demise of international trade. An interconnected world that had boasted major empires and societies, relative peace, robust commerce, and monumental architecture was lost and the so-called First Dark Age had begun. Now, in After 1177 B.C., Eric Cline tells the compelling story of what happened next, over four centuries, across the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean world. It is a story of resilience, transformation, and success, as well as failures, in an age of chaos and reconfiguration. After 1177 B.C. tells how the collapse of powerful Late Bronze Age civilizations created new circumstances to which people and societies had to adapt. Those that failed to adjust disappeared from the world stage, while others transformed themselves, resulting in a new world order that included Phoenicians, Philistines, Israelites, Neo-Hittites, Neo-Assyrians, and Neo-Babylonians. Taking the story up to the resurgence of Greece marked by the first Olympic Games in 776 B.C., the book also describes how world-changing innovations such as the use of iron and the alphabet emerged amid the chaos. Filled with lessons for today's world about why some societies survive massive shocks while others do not, After 1177 B.C. reveals why this period, far from being the First Dark Age, was a new age with new inventions and new opportunities.

The church annexes of late antique Cyprus were bustling places of industry, producing olive oil, flour, bread, ceramics, and metal products. From its earliest centuries, the church was an economic player, participating in agricultural and artisanal production. More than a Church brings together architecture, ceramics, numismatics, landscape archaeology, and unpublished excavation material, alongside consideration of Cyprus’s dynamic and prosperous 4th–10th-century history. Keane offers a rich picture of the association between sacred buildings and agricultural and industrial facilities—comprehensively presenting, for the first time, the church’s economic role and impact in late antique Cyprus.

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 kilometers 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 color GIS maps provide a wealth of information on pottery densities and site distribtutions. This well-illustrated monograph will serve as a model for future research throughout the region.

This volume examines the applicability of central place theory in contemporary archaeological practice and thought in light of ongoing developments in landscape archaeology, by bringing together ‘central places’ and ‘un-central landscapes’ and by grasping diachronically the complex relation between town and country, as shaped by political economies and the availability of natural resources. Moving away from model-bounded approaches, central place theory is used more flexibly to include all the places that may have functioned as loci of economic or ideological centrality (even in a local context) in the past. Fourteen chapters examine centrality and un-central landscapes from Prehistory to the late Middle Ages in different geographical contexts, from Cyprus and the Levant, through Greece and the Balkans to Italy, France, and Germany.