A. Bernard Knapp

Knapp was born in 1941 and studied at the University of Akron (BA 1967) and the University of California, Berkeley (MA 1973, PhD 1979)¹⁵. The German national library's authority file gives his full name as Arthur Bernard Knapp²². His doctorate at Berkeley was in Mediterranean archaeology²¹. His dissertation was titled "A re-examination of the interpretation of Cypriote material culture in the MCII-LCI period in the light of textual data"²³.

He taught archaeology and ancient Near Eastern studies at Berkeley from 1979 to 1983, was a National Research Fellow at the University of Sydney from 1984 to 1987, and in 1988 was a Fulbright Fellow at the Cyprus-American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) in Nicosia¹⁵. In 1990 he was a research assistant at Cambridge on the British Academy project "Science and Archaeology: Bronze Age Trade in the Aegean and Adjacent Areas"¹⁵. By 2000 he had also held a research post at Macquarie University in Sydney, and he was then Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology at Glasgow²¹. There he taught honours and postgraduate courses on Cypriot and Mediterranean prehistory²⁴. Thomas Kiely writes that he supervised numerous students at Glasgow working on Cypriot topics, often informed by interests in connectivity, materiality and hybridity¹. He later became Emeritus Professor at Glasgow and Honorary Research Fellow of CAARI, and in 2026 Glasgow still listed him as an affiliate of its School of Humanities^11,25,26.

His early Cyprus work started from texts: in 1983 he argued that an Ugaritic letter, KTU 2.42+2.43, was addressed to the king of Ugarit, which would make it the earliest Ugaritic document concerning Cyprus²⁷. Writing from the University of Sydney in 1985, he reviewed three monographs on Cyprus c. 1700-1200 BC for the Journal of Field Archaeology²⁸. There he warned that outsiders might at first glance find the field "dominated by a traditional, object-oriented approach", and read the Amarna letters from Alashiya as suggesting that by the 14th century BC "a centralized state exercised at least some control over the copper industry"²⁸.

In Current Anthropology in 1990 he wrote that the study of Prehistoric Bronze Age Cyprus consisted of "endless answers but few germane questions", and treated the Philia culture as first and foremost a regional variant of early Prehistoric Bronze Age culture¹⁵. Among the published comments, Steve O. Held found recent research brought together "effortlessly and perceptively" but saw three weaknesses, two methodological and one factual, to which, he wrote, the article did not succumb¹⁵. Held also worried that a "closet diffusionist" might read Knapp's argument as support for an Anatolian origin of the Cypriot Bronze Age, and concluded that if Knapp meant to pose a germane question, few would deny that he had succeeded¹⁵. David Frankel approved the term "Prehistoric Bronze Age" but said it limited the perception of change within the period, and Alan H. Simmons cautioned against one of Knapp's "solutions"¹⁵. With John F. Cherry he then compiled Provenience Studies and Bronze Age Cyprus, which Priscilla Schuster Keswani judged had "certainly succeeded" as a critical resource²⁹.

The Sydney Cyprus Survey Project set out to study how the exploitation of copper and farmland related to the development of complex society and to changes in the landscape, in a 65 sq km area around Politiko and Mitsero⁵. Its 1992 season was preliminary, funded by INSTAP and Macquarie University, with a team under Knapp that included Held, Ian Johnson and Eberhard Zangger²⁰. In 1993 Knapp, then at Macquarie, led a second season over a zone of 14 by 4 km between the two villages³⁰. Kiely calls Knapp the project's instigator and says it moved with him from Macquarie to Glasgow¹. The sources differ on when the fieldwork ended: James Newhard gives 1992 to 1997 and Kiely 1992-1998, and in 1996 the Chronique of the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique described it as a six-year survey planned for 1992-97^1,31,32. Reviewing Given and Knapp's volume on the project, Newhard called its synthesis of environmental, geological and archaeological data "an excellent example for future projects", though he could not judge the effects of its mathematical transformations of the data³¹.

The survey found Politiko-Phorades, and the article that published it gives two years: its text says that in 1996 the geomorphologist Jay Noller saw slag and furnace material in a stream bank, but a photo caption dates the site's discovery to 1995⁹. The dig was a joint project of Glasgow and the University of Cyprus, with Mike Donnelly and Paul Duffy as field directors, according to Vasiliki Kassianidou³³. Knapp, Kassianidou and Donnelly wrote in 2001 that the site had been the focus of their work for four years⁹. They dated it by its pottery to c. 1600 BCE and called it "the earliest primary smelting workshop yet excavated on Cyprus"⁹. Kassianidou reports three tons of primary smelting slag, hundreds of furnace and tuyère fragments, and radiocarbon dates in the 16th-15th centuries BC³³. Knapp later argued that such sites "must have once been ubiquitous" around the Troodos mining areas, most of them since destroyed by modern mining³⁴.

By 2002 he was one of four directors of the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project, with Michael Given, Kassianidou and Noller, surveying 160 sq km of the northern Troodos slopes from Skouriotissa and Kaliana to Potami and Xyliatos³⁵. That survey relocated the Katydata cemetery dug by Markides in the 1910s and found a settlement that seems to have been linked to it³⁵. In 2008 Knapp wrote that he had directed three field projects on the island²⁴.

In 1998, with Sophia Antoniadou, he wrote that where the past is destroyed by war, nationalist fervour, inter-ethnic conflict and the illicit trade in antiquities, political neutrality is unachievable¹⁷. They noted that archaeologists had no legal status to work in the occupied northern part of the island, and argued that Turkish Cypriot archaeologists had a moral duty to protect its heritage against large-scale destruction and looting¹⁷. They added that the culture history of Cyprus had become biased because for 23 years fieldwork had been limited to the southern 63 per cent of the island¹⁷.

On metals, Knapp opened a 2000 paper by saying archaeologists often seemed "either sceptical of science-based archaeology or baffled by its results"²¹. Noel Gale replied in 2001 that he was correcting "various misconceptions" in Knapp's papers on the lead isotope provenance of copper, and that there was no need for hypotheses of Mediterranean-wide mixing or recycling³⁶. Writing later of Gale's 1991 analyses, Knapp questioned why Chalcolithic metal that Gale read as non-Cypriot could not have come from Cypriot ores³⁴.

With Ioannis Voskos he revisited in 2008 the "colonization narrative" of a major Aegean migration to Cyprus, arguing that 12th-11th-century material culture mixed Cypriot, Aegean and Levantine trends and may represent a new elite identity³⁷. Philipp Stockhammer argued that their definition of hybridization only seemed to rest on postcolonial theory and saw no use for it in telling colonization from other contact, and he reports that Reinhard Jung called its use for the period "premature"³⁸. Giampaolo Graziadio, writing in 2025, judges that Knapp offers "one of the most complex perspectives on hybridization"³⁹.

The same idea shaped his view of the start of the Bronze Age: in Prehistoric and Protohistoric Cyprus (2008) he used hybrid practices to counter the division of the island's people into migrant Philia and indigenous Chalcolithic groups, a view he quotes from Jennifer M. Webb and Frankel as a "focal migration of extended family groups into western Cyprus from southwestern Anatolia"²⁴. Maria Dikomitou summarises his main disagreement with them: the changes were not "directly introduced" to the island⁴⁰. Lisa Graham calls his argument for elites controlling a copper trade with the mainland problematic for the Early and Middle Bronze Age⁴¹.

On Alashiya, Knapp writes that Maria Iacovou has pointed out that its identification with Bronze Age Cyprus is not universally accepted, and replies that virtually every ancient historian of the period accepts it²⁴. In the essay "Cyprus, Copper, and Alashiya" he notes that Muhly's identification of Alashiya with Cyprus has had supporters, himself among them, and detractors such as Robert Merrillees; he writes that it "would seem perverse to deny" that the Alashiya tablets came from Cyprus, and takes the case as proven "beyond any reasonable doubt"⁴².

He dedicated the 2008 book to his Cypriot colleagues, naming Vassos Karageorghis, Kassianidou and Sophocles Hadjisavvas²⁴. Stella Katsarou-Tzeveleki called its synthesis of insularity theory a major contribution that makes it "a seminal work", though she thought it should have given a chapter to cultural identity⁴³. His Archaeology of Cyprus (2013) divided the Bronze Age into a Prehistoric (c. 2400-1700 BC) and a Protohistoric phase (c. 1700-1100 BC)⁴⁴. A reviewer in Antiquity wrote that, apart from two earlier syntheses, no one before had integrated the recent fieldwork into such a presentation, hesitated over Knapp's demand to separate the timescale from material culture, and recommended the book to students and professionals⁴⁴.

With Peter van Dommelen he edited The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean (2014)¹¹. He co-edits the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology with Cherry and van Dommelen and is general editor of the series Monographs in Mediterranean Archaeology²⁵. Later work includes Mediterranean Connections with Stella Demesticha, "Crisis in Context" with Sturt W. Manning in 2016, a paper on Sardinia and Cyprus with Anthony Russell in 2017, and "Maritime narratives of prehistoric Cyprus" in 2020^26,45,46. In 2012 he chaired a session of CAARI's annual archaeological workshop and sat with Andrew McCarthy and Webb on the committee for its 2013 conference on J.R.B. Stewart⁴⁷. In Migration Myths (2021) he argued that most migration scenarios for the end of the Bronze Age in the southern Levant were inadequately grounded, and called his own conclusion "ultimately inconclusive"²⁵.