Historiography and Archaeological Theory in Cypriot Prehistory

Presented at the CAARI and British Museum conference on British-period archaeology in Cyprus, this paper by Bernard Knapp surveys the historiography of Cypriot prehistoric archaeology and the development of archaeological theory on the island over the past sixty years. Drawing on the historiographical frameworks of Tim Murray, Oscar Moro Abadía, and Bruce Trigger, Knapp sets the theoretical turns of recent decades against the first century of archaeological work on the island.

He begins with 19th-century diplomats, bankers, and soldiers such as the Cesnola brothers, Robert Lang at Dali, and Thomas Sandwith, whose study of funerary pottery moved a step beyond antiquarianism. In the 1880s and 1890s, Max Ohnefalsch-Richter dug at Salamis and Tamassos and, with John Myres, catalogued the growing collection of the Cyprus Museum. High Commissioner Bulwer's 1887 decision to restrict excavation permits to scientific bodies brought the Cyprus Exploration Fund and the British Museum into the field, though their campaigns at Enkomi, Kourion, and Maroni largely emptied tombs and dispersed objects abroad.

In the first half of the 20th century, the Swedish Cyprus Expedition established the culture-historical framework that long dominated the discipline. Between 1930 and 1960, international missions and Porphyrios Dikaios excavated major prehistoric sites including Khirokitia, Sotira, Erimi, Vounous, and Enkomi. From 1963 to 1989, Vassos Karageorghis directed the Department of Antiquities within this same culture-historical tradition, while foreign missions and regional surveys by Stanley Price and the Canadian Palaepaphos Survey Project introduced multidisciplinary and science-based methods, largely without explicit theory.

Knapp dates the turn toward theoretical engagement to a 1993 issue of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research on Cypriot social complexity. By 2000, scholars were combining processual, post-processual, and social approaches. He notes the contributions of Diane Bolger, Priscilla Keswani, Louise Steel, and Jennifer Webb on gender, mortuary ritual, and materiality; Maria Iacovou's work at Palaepaphos and her Cyprocentric approach; landscape surveys by Sturt Manning and Kevin Fisher; and Edgar Peltenburg's research on gender, emergent elites, and household memory. Looking ahead, Knapp calls for work on material agency, postcolonial theory, mobility, and maritime connectivity, while noting that the political division of Cyprus restricts fieldwork and analysis to roughly two-thirds of the island.