Swedish Cyprus Expedition centenary conference in Nicosia calls for papers by 31 October

The Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) is inviting abstracts for Archaeological legacies of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition: 100 years on, a conference in Nicosia on 14–16 October 2027. It marks a century since the Swedish Cyprus Expedition started digging on the island. A keynote lecture opens the meeting on the Thursday evening, and papers fill the Friday and Saturday.

CAARI organises it with the Department of Antiquities and the University of Cyprus's Archaeological Research Unit, with the Swedish Institute at Athens, SIMA and the Embassy of Sweden in Cyprus as partners. The organising committee is Lindy Crewe, Giorgos Papasavvas, Jennifer Webb and Anna Satraki.

Directed by Einar Gjerstad, the Swedes set out to sort the island's archaeology from the Neolithic to the Roman period. Between 1927 and 1931 they dug 25 sites (a total that counts Gjerstad's own fieldwork of 1923–1924), from early villages to Iron Age cities such as Kition, Amathus and Idalion, and took much of the material to Sweden. The excavation reports appeared in three volumes between 1934 and 1937; the period syntheses followed, the last of them the Middle and Late Cypriot Bronze Age parts by Paul Åström and colleagues in 1972. Many of the sites, Enkomi and Lapithos among them, lie in the north occupied since the 1974 Turkish invasion, and the organisers note that for those areas the Swedish volumes may be the only archaeological reference. The expedition's story is told in The Swedish Cyprus Expedition and What It Left Behind.

Papers must deal with the expedition's excavations or its publications. The committee hopes to cover every site it dug, either one site per paper or in period groups, and suggests themes such as fresh readings of sites, object types and chronologies; what legacy data are worth; site types and settlement patterns; digital methods; and the care and display of the collections.

Abstracts of up to 400 words go to librarian@caari.org.cy by 31 October 2026, and the committee will choose its speakers by early December 2026. The full call lists the sites by period.