Beyond Representation: Cypriot Rural Sanctuaries as Assemblages

Erin Walcek Averett re-evaluates the limestone statues and terracotta figurines from the rural sanctuary at Athienou-Malloura, excavated by the Athienou Archaeological Project under Michael Toumazou. Starting from the history of scholarship on Cypriot sculpture, she notes how twentieth-century studies privileged formal typology, style and chronology, treating votives as passive representations of a donor's piety or of conservative rural custom. Drawing on post-humanist frameworks, new materialism and assemblage theory, she argues instead that votives, worshippers, architecture and the surrounding countryside formed shifting assemblages whose meanings changed long after an object was first dedicated.

Averett sets the sanctuary within the Malloura Valley on the southern edge of the Mesaoria plain, near Golgoi and along inland routes toward Ledra, Salamis, Kition, Idalion and Tamassos. Survey and excavation show little settlement in the valley itself before the Roman period; during the Cypro-Archaic period and the Cypro-Classical period, the valley was used mainly as a ritual and mortuary zone, with chamber tombs on the nearby hill of Maghara Tepesi in view of the open-air temenos.

Founded at the end of the Cypro-Geometric III period, the sanctuary was reorganized at the end of the fourth century BC in the Hellenistic period. Earlier statues and figurines were gathered into construction fill to level the courtyard, built into the courses of the new peribolos wall (some visible, some hidden), or retained on display alongside new dedications. Averett shows excavation contexts where Cypro-Archaic and Cypro-Classical votaries and warrior figurines lay directly on Hellenistic floors next to statuettes of Pan, arguing that keeping older sculptures in view collapsed linear time and gave them new roles.

The final section examines how votives made deities present (including Zeus Ammon, Artemis, Bes, Herakles and Pan) and how repetition worked on visitors and craftspeople. Averett highlights repeated protective figures of Bes on a wall plaque and on the Amathus sarcophagus, the recurring warrior figurines, and a dense concentration of at least eighty Pan statuettes in one part of the sanctuary. In the discussion afterwards, Maria Iacovou, Giorgos Papantoniou, Nancy Serwint, Jennifer Webb and Nicholas Blackwell raise questions on Roman lamps, breakage, settlement visibility in the Mesaoria, the Late Bronze Age sanctuary at Athienou, and burnt animal bone and modern looters' pits.