Sturt W. Manning

Between 1990 and 1997 Sturt W. Manning directed a survey and a series of excavations in the lower Maroni valley, on the south coast of Cyprus, from the University of Reading^1,2. In 1994 he published ten radiocarbon dates that revised the chronology of the island's Early Bronze Age.

The Maroni valley

The Maroni Valley Archaeological Survey Project began in 1990 as an intensive survey of the lower Maroni River valley, working in association with Gerald Cadogan's Maroni Valley Project, which had been active there since 1981. The survey continued through 1993¹. Its first two seasons, 1990 and 1991, were reported by Manning and D. H. Conwell in the Department of Antiquities' annual report^6,10.

At Petrera the project made a rescue excavation in 1992 and 1993 of a badly damaged basilican church of the seventh century, with outlying structures. Finds included Roman amphorae, cooking ware, glass, and coins of Heraclius, the earliest from AD 624/5, and of Constans II, from AD 643/4¹. A monograph on the church and the other Roman remains of the valley, by Manning and a team of specialists, appeared in 2002¹¹.

At Tsaroukkas, a Late Cypriot settlement and cemetery, the project made limited trials in 1993 to study Aegean, especially Mycenaean, interaction with Late Bronze Age Cyprus. It found walls, a storage jar in place, a steatite cylinder seal and Late Helladic IIIA-IIIB1 imports, and it located seven anchors offshore. Collapsed tombs confirmed where the British Museum had excavated the cemetery in 1897¹. Later seasons by the British team directed by Manning added pedestrian and geophysical survey, looted tombs of Late Cypriot I to IIA/B, two buildings of Late Cypriot IIC (one possibly a textile workshop), slag and olive pits; the finds included a glass kohl bottle, a scarab and a cylinder seal². Manning and Sarah J. Monks published the tombs, both the 1897 British Museum finds and the later ones, in the Annual of the British School at Athens in 1998^6,8. That year he also published an article in World Archaeology on the reuse of ancient monuments in Late Bronze Age Cyprus⁷.

Dates and chronology

Manning and Stuart Swiny published the ten AMS dates from Sotira-Kaminoudhia in 1994, with the revised chronology³. Kearney's Cyprus Before History summarises the dates as giving a range of c. 2300 to 2100 BC⁴. In the same year Manning, A. Bernard Knapp and S. O. Held published a review of Cypriot prehistory in the Journal of World Prehistory⁵. Knapp and Manning later wrote together on the end of the Late Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean, in the American Journal of Archaeology in 2016¹³. With Catherine Kearns he edited New Directions in Cypriot Archaeology, published in 2019¹⁴.

Manning's doctorate is from Cambridge. At Cornell University he is Goldwin Smith Professor of Classical Archaeology and directs the Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology¹⁵.

In 2024 he was lead author of a paper in PLOS ONE on the Kyrenia Ship, the Greek merchant ship excavated off the north coast of Cyprus in 1967 to 1969. The published reconstruction of the wreck had placed its final voyage in 294 to 290 BCE, with a Ptolemaic coin that is very difficult to read as the key evidence for the earliest date. Radiocarbon dates from the ship's timbers and short-lived contents did not fit that range on the standard calibration curve, which for 350 to 250 BCE rested on older measurements. The team measured new tree-ring samples of known age for the period and obtained a revised calibration record for 433 to 250 BCE. On it the ship's dating became consistent with the archaeological evidence, and might be a few years later than current estimates. The same data confirmed, with very slight change, the published date of the Mazotos ship, another Greek merchant ship from the south coast of Cyprus¹⁶.