Characterizing the Philia Facies: Material Culture, Chronology, and the           Origin of the Bronze Age in Cyprus

Webb, Jennifer M.; Frankel, David

doi:10.2307/506576

Cited by 46 publications

(24 citation statements)

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“…The Philia facies, which marks the transition to the Early Bronze Age, is characterised by the establishment of new settlements in the central and western Mesaoria, around the edges of Troodhos mountains, and along the north coast. Some, therefore, were in close proximity to the island's copper deposits, near good agricultural land, and/or with access to the sea [35]. There are small shifts in settlement pattern throughout the longue durée of the EC-MC period.…”

Section: The Cypriot Bronze Age Landscape: a Brief Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Watery Entanglements in the Cypriot Hinterland

Steel

2018

Land

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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.Land 2018, 7, 104 2 of 16 with which they interacted. This shift in perspective actively embeds humans within the material environment, and draws attention to how human agency is constituted by the matter with which it engages. This is a recursive relationship: matter equally responds to, acts with, and even directs human agency, both enabling and provoking certain responses from the human actor. Therefore, although this approach questions the dominant, privileged position of human agents, it does not advocate that we cease searching for people and their actions within the archaeological record. Indeed, the new materialisms perspective potentially provides a middle ground between empirical, science-based archaeologies and social archaeology [5], bridging the intellectual gap that has developed between studies of the environment and artefacts: the former traditionally as a resource to be exploited and mastered, and the latter as objects created by, belonging to, and imbued with meaning by people. Central Places, Networks, or New Materialisms? People in the LandscapeIn this paper, I address the interactions of people with, and within, the Bronze Age landscape of Cyprus. Previously, archaeological studies of settlement and landscape have drawn upon central place theory and network theory. Central place theory [6] looks at political and economic relationships of settlements within a wider rural territory, specifically identifying locales that serve as the economic, sociopolitical, and ideological hub. There is an understanding that these are urban in character and have a centralised administrative role, such as the collection of taxes. Jimenez and Garcia (p. 85) [7] provide us with several criteria for the archaeological identification of a central place. This should be the largest site in the region, dominating it administratively, economically, and physically (presumably through ideo...

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Section: The Cypriot Bronze Age Landscape: a Brief Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Watery Entanglements in the Cypriot Hinterland

Steel

2018

Land

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“…For the first few generations (the Philia phase of the Early Bronze Age) it was characterised by a uniformity of material culture indicating close connections between different parts of the island (Webb and Frankel, 1999). The social and economic networks involved the distribution of pottery of very similar fabrics and shapes from the north to other areas of the island (Dikomitou, 2010) and of copper from production areas in the foothills of the Troodos Range to sites on the north coast which were in turn linked into a broader eastern Mediterranean interaction sphere .…”

Section: Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pottery production and distribution in prehistoric Bronze Age Cyprus. An application of pXRF analysis

Frankel

Webb

2012

Journal of Archaeological Science

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“…2300-2000 BC in northern Syria water crises occurred during the period 2200-2050 BC. In Cyprus, the Philia phase of the Early Bronze Age, characterized by a uniformity of material culture indicating close connections between different parts of the island (Webb and Frankel 1999;Webb 2012:1380) and linked to a broader Eastern Mediterranean interaction sphere, breaks down ca. 2300-2200 BC and the other ca.…”

Section: S4mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Interaction of Climate Change and Agency in the Collapse of Civilizations ca. 2300–2000 BC

Wiener¹

2014

Radiocarbon

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Human history has been marked by major episodes of climate change and human response, sometimes accompanied by independent innovations. In the Bronze Age, the sequencing of causes and reactions is dependent in part on dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating. This paper explores the interaction of a major, prolonged desiccation event between ca. 2300 and 2000 BC and human agency including migrations, the displacement of trading networks, warfare, the appearance of weapons made of bronze, and the first appearance of sailing vessels in the Mediterranean.

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Characterizing the Philia Facies: Material Culture, Chronology, and the Origin of the Bronze Age in Cyprus

Cited by 46 publications

References 1 publication

Watery Entanglements in the Cypriot Hinterland

Watery Entanglements in the Cypriot Hinterland

Pottery production and distribution in prehistoric Bronze Age Cyprus. An application of pXRF analysis

The Interaction of Climate Change and Agency in the Collapse of Civilizations ca. 2300–2000 BC

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