The early agrarian civilizations around the Mediterranean Basin molded the natural and social landscapes in which many of the world's populations live today. National Science Foundation support will enable Drs. Steven Falconer and Patricia Fall to lead three years of multi-disciplinary investigations of Bronze Age agrarian ecology, household economy and landscape formation leading up to the advent of ancient cities on the island of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean. Research will focus on the ancient farming settlement of Politiko-Troullia and its surrounding environment in the copper-bearing foothills of the Troodos Mountains, Republic of Cyprus. This work builds on the results of previous research at Troullia and a variety of other Early and Middle Bronze Age settlements on Cyprus, elsewhere around the Mediterranean, and in nearby southwestern Asia (ca. 3000-1500 B.C.).
The Early and Middle Bronze people of Cyprus experienced a variety of fundamental changes in lifestyle, economy, and social relations within and between communities leading to the rise of cities and urbanized society in the subsequent Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500-1000 B.C.). Two excavation seasons and one analytical study season, focused on the Early/Middle Bronze Age town of Politiko-Troullia, will explore how agriculture and agricultural life changed on the road toward urbanism, thereby irreversibly creating the intensively-managed landscapes that characterize the Mediterranean Basin today. Considerable energy will be devoted to detailed recovery and analysis of plant remains, animal bones, and metallurgical tools and by products, and exploration of the network of agricultural terraces on Troullia's surrounding hillsides. Special attention will be directed to technological innovation, particularly copper metallurgy, which precociously exploited the world's purest copper deposits in the Troodos. Indeed, the name "Cyprus" may derive from the same ancient Greek root that led to the modern English word "copper." Woven together, this evidence will provide a portrait of agricultural and social dynamics during the crucial lead-up to the earliest urbanism on Cyprus. Ultimately, comparison of the results from Politiko-Troullia, and other contemporaneous Cypriot settlements, with those from Anatolia and the Levant will allow archaeologists, historians and the general public to consider explanations for the intriguing and paradoxically late development of cities on Cyprus and in island societies generally. The implications of this research, therefore, may be applied to similar issues of social and economic disparity, as they may have contributed to the configurations of both the ancient and modern worlds.
This research features an international collaboration between Arizona State University, the Department of Antiquities of the Republic of Cyprus (a member of the European Union), and the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, Nicosia (a member of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers). American and Cypriot undergraduate and graduate students will receive hands-on training in archaeological and geographical fieldwork and analysis, providing first-person grounding in the process of scientific investigation. Special outreach programs connect this project with students at the University of Cyprus (Nicosia), and in the elementary and middle schools of Phoenix and Tempe, Arizona, as well as in the neighboring villages of Pera and Politiko, Cyprus. This project takes special pride in conveying the importance of understanding 1) the connections between ancient and modern Cyprus specifically, and 2) the origins of modern life ways as they developed from the innovations of our ancestors in deep history.
