Late Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age Cyprus: From Unilinear to Multilinear Socio-Cultural Change
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 27/09/2018

The transition from the Late Chalcolithic to the Early Bronze Age in Cyprus has been a topic of discussion, and often heated debate amongst archaeologists working on the island, since the discovery of the earliest traces of Bronze Age cultural material in the 1940s. The scarcity of evidence for this transition, the absence of a coherent island-wide typology for the Late Chalcolithic wares, the lack of chronological information for many sites dating to and around either side of this transition, and the continued inaccessibility due to the 1974 Turkish invasion of the northern half of the island to the archaeological community, have led to approaches that rely heavily on abstract archaeological theory. In turn, these approaches tend to homogenize the pool of data and mask regional differences embedded in the material culture, while they ignore spatiotemporal differences in the rate and mode of adoption/rejection of technological, social, material and cultural changes. As such, the theoretical models proposed, regarding the causes and course of this transition thus far, are largely unilinear, exclude the possibility of lengthy overlaps between cultural periods, and present the internal and/or external agents of change acting as unified or singular socio-political entities. Contrary to current approaches, this study having completed an in-depth re-examination and where necessary re-study of the totality of available data (bibliographic, chronometric, spatial and pottery data), wishes to break from the unilinear tradition and attempt to outline a divergent multilinear explanatory model, where change occurs or is effected at varying speeds, in which regions and perhaps individual sites emerge as the primary actors of change, and where the external versus internal agents of change debate is replaced by a complex web of dynamically interacting population groups.

Author: Dr. Charalambos, Paraskeva - Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of History and Archaeology, University of Cyprus (Presenting author)