This paper examines how water shaped people’s interaction with the landscape in Cyprus during the Bronze Age. The theoretical approach is drawn from the new materialisms, effectively a ‘turn to ...matter’, which emphasises the very materiality of the world and challenges the privileged position of human agents over the rest of the environment. The paper specifically moves away from more traditional approaches to landscape archaeology, such as central place theory and more recently network theory, which serve to separate and distance people from the physical world they live in, and indeed are a part of; instead, it focuses on an approach that embeds humans, and the social/material worlds they create, as part of the environment, exploring human interactions within the landscape as assemblages, or entanglements of matter. It specifically emphasises the materiality and agency of water and how this shaped people’s engagement with, and movement through, their landscape. The aim is to encourage archaeologists to engage with the materiality of things, to better understand how people and other matter co-create the material (including social) world.
Body Matters approaches the material world directly; it seeks to remind people that they are the matter of their bodies. This volume offers an assortment of contributions from anthropology, ...archaeology and medieval studies, with case studies from northern Europe, the Near East, East Africa and Amazonia, which variously draw attention to the multiple shifting materials that comprise, impact upon and co-create human bodies. This lively collection foregrounds myriad material influences interacting with and shaping the human body; the chapters come together to illustrate the fundamental fleshy, bony, suppurating, leaky and oozing physicality of being human. Ultimately, by reminding readers of their indisputable materiality, Body Matters seeks to draw people and the rest of the material world together to illustrate that bodies not only seep into (and are part of) the landscape, but equally that people and the material world are inextricably co-constitutive.
This article explores social practices and the material world at Aredhiou Vouppes, a Late Bronze Age rural community in the Cypriot hinterland. In-depth analysis of the excavation results ...demonstrates that this site was more complex than current typologies of inland production centers, based mainly on survey data, would suggest. Instead, it was multifunctional and played an important economic role within the wider Cypriot landscape. This article addresses the evidence for initial occupation at Aredhiou during Middle Cypriot III–Late Cypriot (LC) I, but the main focus is on the substantial LC IIC remains. Through a detailed contextual analysis and the identification of a multiplicity of activities practiced at the site, I examine social practice, gender relations, and ritual performance within a small farming community.
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The importance of cultural contacts in the East Mediterranean has long been recognized and is the focus of ongoing international research. Fieldwork in the Aegean, Egypt, Cyprus, and the Levant ...continues to add to our understanding of the nature of this contact and its social and economic significance, particularly to the cultures of the Aegean. Despite sophisticated discussion of the archaeological evidence, in particular on the part of Aegean and Mediterranean archaeologists, there has been little systematic attempt to incorporate anthropological perspectives on materiality and exchange into archaeological narratives of this material. This book addresses that gap and integrates anthropological discourse on contact, examining exchange systems, the gift, notions of geographical distance and power, colonization, and hybridization. Furthermore, it develops a social narrative of culture contact in the Mediterranean context, illustrating the reasons communities chose to engage in international exchange, and how this impacted the construction of identities throughout the region.
While traditional archaeologies in the East Mediterranean have tended to be reductive in their approach to material culture and how it was produced, used, and exchanged, this book reviews current research on material culture, focusing on issues such as the biography of objects, inalienable possessions, and hybridization - exploring how these issues can further illuminate the material world of the communities of the Bronze Age Mediterranean.
This article explores the materiality of food production and consumption within the household in Bronze Age Cyprus. The focus is on embodied encounters with the “stuff of food”—the pots, pans, and ...other kitchen implements that were used on a daily basis—and how these shaped people’s lives. Throughout the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, generations of families on Cyprus used Red Polished pottery to serve and consume food and drink: the round-bottomed pots were not designed to be laid on a table, indicative of the development of very specific customs of dining at home. The very limited range of pottery (wares and forms) available to the Early-Middle Cypriot householder suggests a monotone cultural experience. The introduction of vessels with flat bases or ring bases at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age might indicate a move to dining around a table—a radically different engagement with the physical, material world that undoubtedly affected social relations. This was accompanied by radical shifts in production practices—a move away from household production into the realm of craft specialists—alongside which there was an explosion in the range of tableware for consumption of food and drink and of utilitarian wares used within the kitchen. This article interrogates the implied transformations in the cultural knowledge embedded within people’s engagement with their material world and the very different visual and tactile experiences involved in the daily use of pottery in the Late Bronze Age Cypriot household.
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This paper explores Egyptian influence in Late Bronze Age Cyprus through the lens of cultural hybridity. It draws specifically on Bhabha’s concept of the third space, identified here as an in-between ...space where two (or more) cultural identities mix and become materially entangled. Key for such an analysis of Cypro-Egyptian contacts is the understanding that this place need not have any direct political dimensions but instead could be a fluid space characterized by diverse contact situations. The focus is Egyptian(izing) objects from Enkomi, which highlight the cultural impact of New Kingdom Cypro-Egyptian cultural contacts.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
•Figurines allow us to explore people’s relationship with the gendered body through gesture, posture and clothing.•Figurines communicate messages of social identity.•Gender is constructed through ...material performances of the body, through gesture and dress.•The body language of figurines is meaningful and can be explored experientially.•Details of clothing on the figurines allows us to explore how gender identity might be layered on the body.
This paper examines Mycenaean female figurines, focusing on their gesture, posture, and dress as evidence for somatic messages of Mycenaean female personhood and identity and what this might tell us about women’s lives in Late Bronze Age Greece. The primary focus is on the corporeal messages encoded in the figurines, with reference to Butler’s understanding of gender performativity and Connerton’s notion of incorporated body knowledges, to better understand how the figurines were embedded in Mycenaean habitus. This includes an experiential study of the gestures and posture of the figurines, to explore ancient embodied experiences, and analysis of the painted and applied details of clothing of the three main female types. The aim of the paper is to explore becoming a Mycenaean woman through the medium of sculpted clay.
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This paper examines the materiality of the Cypriot Base Ring ware through the lens of the new materialisms. Specifically, it draws upon Bennett’s vibrant matter and thing-power, to explore how ...cultural and technological knowledges of Late Bronze Age Cyprus were informed through material engagements with clay. This approach highlights the agency of matter and illustrates how the distinct capacities of clay (working with water and fire) provoked, enabled and constrained potters’ behaviour, resulting in a distinctive pottery style that was central to the Late Cypriot social and material world. The aim is to demonstrate how people, materials and objects are all matter in relationship, drawing attention to the fluidity, porosity and relationality of the material world.
This article considers the application of the New Materialisms within archaeology, primarily in response to Witmore’s influential discussion article: Archaeology and the New Materialisms (2014), ...specifically his emphasis on things. This, the authors demonstrate, is peripheral to the main thrust of the New Materialisms discourse. They unravel complexities in the terminology and consider the etymological and epistemological framework of concepts such as matter and thing. This leads them to consider some important issues that arise applying Deleuzian assemblages to the archaeological record and the potential of employing Barad’s agential realist theory instead. Barad’s concept of phenomena moves beyond the notion of things as separate, bounded entities, emphasizing entanglements of matter and illustrates how matter (including humans) co-create the material world. The authors’ aim is to demonstrate how engaging with matter rather than things enables us to better make sense of the material world and our place within it.
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