A Conference in Honour of A. Bernard Knapp: Material agency and monumental architecture at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios

Presented at a conference in honour of A. Bernard Knapp, this paper examines the materiality, meaning, and use of built environments and portable objects in the Late Bronze Age. The speaker, whose name is cut off at the start of the recording, studied under David Rupp at Brock University, completed a PhD at the University of Toronto with Knapp as external examiner, and now works at the University of British Columbia, building here on Knapp's scholarship on the agency of things and place-making.

The talk first reviews theoretical debates around material agency and affordances, drawing on Gibson, Appadurai, Lefebvre, and Knapp's 2018 paper on human-material interactions. It then turns to monumental architecture in urban centres of the mid-14th to 13th centuries, arguing that buildings at sites such as Enkomi and Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios ordered space and structured daily movement and social occasions.

Three building materials are examined in detail through a chaîne opératoire approach. First is ashlar masonry. At Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios and Maroni-Vournes, builders quarried calcareous sandstone from the Pakhna formation near Tochni, leaving lifting bosses and deep tool marks on the softer stone as visible markers of elite control over labour and expertise, whereas the harder reef limestone from the Koronia formation used at Temple 1 at Kition was dressed to a smooth, reflective surface. Second is lime plaster: micromorphological analysis by the CANBIE project in Room 1 of Building 16 at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios identified eleven pyrogenic lime plaster floor surfaces separated by crushed calcite and sediment fill, showing repeated renewal of a central court associated with feasting. Third is mudbrick: drawing on comparisons with Hattusha and preliminary geoarchaeological analysis by Rachel Kulick on samples from Building 10, the speaker argues that mudbrick production required large quantities of water near the Vasilikos River and consistent recipes pointing to centralised manufacture.

The final section reconstructs how people and things interacted during ceremonial feasts in the ashlar-lined central court of Building 10 at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, starting from the Late Cypriot IIC deposit excavated by Alison South in Room 173, which held sheep and goat bones and at least 85 fine ware vessels, mostly Mycenaean imports and local imitations. Using proxemics, seal imagery, and visibility experiments on Mycenaean pictorial kraters decorated with horses and chariots, the speaker and his team at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver have built a virtual reality model of Building 10 to test lighting, movement, and sightlines. In a brief question at the end, Knapp challenges the overuse of the term feasting for ancient ceremonial consumption.