A Conference in Honour of A. Bernard Knapp: Souskiou-Laona, Iron Age Communities, the Troodos and Survey Theory

This session from the second day of the conference in honour of A. Bernard Knapp at the University of Cyprus is chaired by Sturt Manning and brings together four papers on mortuary archaeology, Iron Age communities and survey on the island.

Lindy Crewe presents the excavation of the Middle Chalcolithic extramural cemetery at Souskiou-Laona, ahead of the monograph with contributions by Edgar Peltenburg, Diane Bolger and other specialists. Although heavily looted, the limestone outcrop yielded 151 rock-cut features, chiefly shaft tombs, small shafts and scoop pits. Intact deposits followed strict rules: the last burial lay flexed on its right side with the head to the south-east, while earlier interments were stacked in bone piles of up to eight individuals at the northern end. Tomb 168 held four rearranged individuals with body parts swapped between clusters and large chipped-stone flakes, alongside an adjacent pit without human remains that may have acted as a proxy tomb. Finds included cruciform figurines and pendants of picrolite (showing heavier use-wear at Laona than at nearby Vathyrkakas), an anthropomorphic birthing vessel, dentalium shell, copper spirals and tin-bearing faience beads.

Catherine Kearns examines the limits of protohistory and how macro-historical narratives of the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Cypro-Geometric and Cypro-Archaic periods rely on singular objects such as the Opheltas obelos from Palaepaphos-Skales or the stele of Sargon II from Kition. Calling for high-resolution radiocarbon dating across the Hallstatt plateau, she uses legacy and 2016 to 2017 survey and geophysical work around Amathus and the Vasilikos and Maroni valleys, including Kalavasos-Vouni Phasouli and Maroni-Vournes, to examine how rural communities interacted with urban centres. Ceramic analysis by Anna Georgiadou shows local or Amathus-oriented utilitarian wares and very few imports.

Georgia Andreou reconsiders the Troodos mountains through postcolonial geography, arguing that British colonial mapping, forest regulations and hill-station leisure, together with classical texts and the search for Roman slag heaps, shaped modern archaeological definitions of the massif. She contrasts these top-down boundaries and the work of Demetrios Christodoulou with the ethnographic and environmental approaches of the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project and the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project.

Michael Given critiques the Cartesian, top-down perspective of Mediterranean intensive survey, settlement hierarchies and GIS, tracing their roots to colonial surveying and the early modern scientific paradigm of dominating nature. Drawing on Jay Noller's geomorphological work on Late Roman land levelling near Skouriotissa, resilience theory and Erin Gibson's community project at Nikitari in the Asinou valley, he argues for replacing traditional survey with an integrated study of socio-ecological systems and entangled human and ecological communities.