Sturt W. Manning

Manning took a BA Hons at the Australian National University in 1986 and an MA Hons at Macquarie University in 1988¹⁹. His PhD came from the University of Cambridge in 1995¹⁹. At the University of Reading he was Lecturer in the Department of Classics from 1992 to 1996, then Lecturer and Reader in the Department of Archaeology from 1996 to 2003¹⁹. He held the Walter Graham/Homer Thompson Chair in Aegean Prehistory at the University of Toronto in 2004-2005¹⁹.

By 2008 he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cornell University and Director of the Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology²⁰. Cornell now styles him Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Classics and Director of the Cornell Tree Ring Laboratory^19,21.

Manning and Conwell had worked together on the team at Gerald Cadogan's excavations at the Late Bronze Age site of Maroni Vournes, and with Cadogan's encouragement they planned a survey of the valley¹⁸. The two of them made a preliminary season and review of the survey region in 1990¹⁸. Andreou's table of surveys gives the project's directors as S. Manning and D. Conwell for 1990-1993²². The last field-study season was in 1997¹⁸.

In July 1991 the Late Roman church and associated structures at Maroni Petrera were bulldozed, and ploughing damaged them further before summer 1992¹⁸. It was agreed that the bulldozing stop and that the survey project study what was left of the site¹⁸. With the agreement of the Department of Antiquities, the project began further survey and a limited salvage excavation there in 1992, a small-scale effort because of restricted personnel and money¹⁸. Manning directed the work, with D.H. Conwell as co-director in 1990-1991, M.J. Ponting as field director in 1992-1994 and A. Manning as field director in 1995-1997¹⁸.

The final volume on Petrera, by Manning and colleagues, was published in 2002 by the A. G. Leventis Foundation, whose Director was Vassos Karageorghis^18,21. Its authors argue that coins of Heraclius and Constans II make it seem likely that the site was abandoned in the mid-7th century, and that it is perhaps no coincidence that this marks the first Arab invasions of Cyprus¹⁸. They also write that "we may assume" the church was, from the mid-5th century, the seat of local ritual, and perhaps civic, power¹⁸.

In 1993 the survey, directed by Manning, made limited trials at the Late Cypriot settlement of Tsaroukkas, close to the sea about 500 m from Vournes, to study Aegean, especially Mycenaean, interaction with Late Bronze Age Cyprus¹. Ellen Herscher reports substantial walls and a storage jar in place, with at least two phases of use, probably in Late Cypriot II¹. The work continued as the University of Reading's Tsaroukkas, Mycenaeans and Trade Project, and in 1996 it partly uncovered two buildings of about 25 x 25 m near the shore, both of the 13th century BC²³.

Louise Steel reports that the British team under Manning excavated the settlement and cemetery with pedestrian and geophysical survey². It located looted tombs of Late Cypriot I-IIA/B, among them tomb 3 on the scarp above the sea with large quantities of early White Slip II pottery². Steel also records two rectilinear buildings of Late Cypriot IIC; one room of Building 1, with many spindle whorls and loom weights, was possibly a textile workshop².

In 1897 a British Museum team had dug at least 26 Late Bronze Age tombs at Tsaroukkas, but Manning and Sarah J. Monks write that its records were so poor that it was not even clear exactly where the cemetery was⁸. The project uncovered fourteen tombs, part tombs or possible tomb deposits, and the two authors state that it fulfilled a primary aim in locating the cemetery that went with the anchorage⁸.

The anchorage was first surveyed in 1995-96 and surveyed again in 2017-19, work Manning published with Carrie E. Atkins in 2022^21,24. A. Bernard Knapp and Nathan Meyer report that the resurvey identified at least 70 stone anchors²⁵. In 2012 Robert S. Merrillees listed Reading's excavations at Tsaroukkas among the fieldwork still awaiting definitive publication²⁶.

In World Archaeology in 1998 Manning argued that a sharp break in funerary practice came in the Maroni valley at the start of the main "urban" Late Bronze Age phase, c. 1300 BC, and that this may be tied to the emergence of a single central ruling authority and figure⁷. Eilis Monahan and Matthew Spigelman write that Manning showed the ashlar building at Vournes was designed to block access to chamber tombs, cutting off lineage-based power²⁷. Knapp and Meyer credit Manning and his colleagues with pointing out that Maroni had no single habitation area but several "clusters" surrounded by open space²⁵.

In 1991 Manning and Stuart Swiny sent charcoal samples from Sotira Kaminoudhia to the Oxford radiocarbon accelerator unit for dating²⁸. The site's final volume states that at the time of their first publication, by Hedges and others in 1993 and by Manning and Swiny the following year, these were the first radiocarbon dates available for the Cypriot Early Bronze Age, and that later dates from Marki Alonia lent further weight to the framework Manning and Swiny suggested²⁸.

His 1995 book on the absolute chronology of the Aegean Early Bronze Age was reviewed by Peter Ian Kuniholm^21,29. Kuniholm wrote that very few scholars could deal with all of its strands at once and that Manning had the courage to withdraw the book and rewrite it completely, but he found the copy-editing lax for an academic press²⁹.

The sources disagree over Manning's high date for the eruption of Thera and the White Slip I bowl found there^30,31. Kathryn Eriksson wrote in 2007 that his high chronology ought to be dismissed, called his term "compromise early chronology" biased, and said it would move accepted Egyptian chronology by at least 50 years, or 130 in Manfred Bietak's view³⁰. A contributor to the third Synchronisation volume reports that Manning argued that regionalism within Cyprus could explain a delay of at least a century between the Thera bowl and White Slip I elsewhere, and that other specialists place the bowl's origin in the west or on the south coast³¹. Manning answered in 2014 that Eriksson's claims that he supports an "intra-island barrier" thesis are "simply not true", and that Bietak's White Slip I argument could be dropped as lacking merit or rigour³². He and his co-authors also denied Bietak's claim that Manning had White Slip I begin in northern Cyprus 150 years before the south³³.

Manning has made concessions of his own^31,32. In the same Synchronisation volume he called a 2002 radiocarbon paper "a little over confident" and wrote "Mea culpa"³¹. In 2014 he wrote that his 1999 book made some mistakes, for one about the grain-silo stratum at Tell el-Dab'a³². According to Cornell, he dated the eruption to about 1609-1560 BCE in 2022 and to within 1617-1565 BCE in 2024³⁴.

From 2008 Manning and Kevin D. Fisher directed fieldwork at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, Maroni-Vournes, Maroni-Tsaroukkas and Tochni-Lakkia, according to Andreou's table²². An interim report by Jeffrey F. Leon, Fisher, Manning and Michael Rogers on the 2011 season of this Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments Project, and a report by Carole McCartney, Vasiliki Kassianidou and Manning on the 2011 excavations at Agia Varvara-Asprokremmos, appeared in 2019³⁵. In 2010 Manning and colleagues argued that survey and excavation had pushed the Neolithic occupation of Cyprus back to the earlier ninth millennium cal BC, by people who were not marginal foragers but networked over the sea³⁶.

A 2024 paper revised the radiocarbon calibration curve for 350-250 BCE, noting that the published date for the Kyrenia ship, ca. 294-290 BCE, rested on a less than certain reading of one coin^21,37. Another 2024 paper reported a floating 264-year chronology of Pinus brutia from several monuments, and dated elements of the Timios Stavros church at Pelendri across the 11th to 16th centuries AD³⁸.

With Catherine Kearns he edited New Directions in Cypriot Archaeology (2019), and alone he edited Critical Approaches to Cypriot and Wider Mediterranean Archaeology (2022)²¹. In his own chapter of the 2019 volume he accepts that Diane Bolger fairly criticised his 1993 model, including for androcentric bias²⁷. Kearns thanks him for encouraging her project on Iron Age settlements and pushing her to undertake it³⁹. In November 2024 the American Society of Overseas Research gave him the P. E. MacAllister Field Archaeology Award, whose citation names his contributions to the archaeology of Cyprus and the wider Near East and Eastern Mediterranean³⁴.