Long-term agrarian landscapes in the Troodos foothills, Cyprus

Fall, Patricia L.; Falconer, Steven E.; Galletti, Christopher S.; Shirmang, Tracy; Ridder, Elizabeth; Klinge, JoAnna

doi:10.1016/j.jas.2012.02.010

Cited by 27 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Although regionality has been explored [43,44], largely through variable patterns in the geographic distribution of pottery, there has been less emphasis on relationships (networks or assemblages) between the EC-MC communities within their wider landscape. Detailed survey and excavation work at Politiko Troullia, however, has looked at the relationship between the site and its surrounding environment, revealing intensive agrarian exploitation of the landscape, but an apparently otherwise isolated farming community [45]. In this issue, Webb examines the relationship between site location, economic resources (especially copper), and their exploitation in the political economy in the island's narrow northern coastal strip: identifying Vasilia, Vounous, and Lapithos as significant nodes (or central places?)…”

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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“…However, they all share a common function of expanding cultivable land [26] with similar outcomes: they modify the landscape, hydrogeology, soil features, and system dynamics [24,25,27]. In the Mediterranean area, terraces are a defining feature of the landscape of many regions (Figure 1; ESM1 Table S1) as they are often quite ancient, built with construction techniques that have not changed much over millennia [25,26,[28][29][30]. Here, dry stone terraces are the most common, predominantly built on marginal lands, and are now largely abandoned (Figure 2a; ESM1 Tables S2 and S3).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Review on Management Strategies of the Terraced Agricultural Systems and Conservation Actions to Maintain Cultural Landscapes around the Mediterranean Area

2021

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Coupled human–environment systems and traditional agricultural landscapes can be a key element in the conservation of biodiversity, ecological functionality, and cultural heritage. Terraced landscapes are a relevant example of traditional landscapes within the Mediterranean area, but they are now threatened due to the abandonment of agricultural activities. In order to identify factors that can affect the conservation strategies needed to maintain terraced landscapes in the Mediterranean area, we performed a literature review on studies about terraces and their management, soil erosion and vegetation dynamics after abandonment, etc. We collated a total of 285 scientific papers reporting 293 case studies in 19 countries. The majority of these studies analyze dry stone terraces and their influence on soil erosion and water runoff, either in cultivated or abandoned terrace systems. Only a minority of papers suggest maintenance or conservation strategies or involve farmers, exploring their decision-making. The conservation of terraced landscapes is in the hands of local farmers, and thus they should be actively involved in decision-making to find the most suitable strategies for assuring the continuity in farming and preserve cultural landscapes in the Mediterranean area.

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“…This discussion is particularly relevant for, despite certain ancient Mediterranean examples (Butzer, , p. 1795; Brown & Walsh, 2017) and the importance of terracing in dry land agriculture in early complex societies, terraced field systems remain challenging targets for dating and interpretation (Fall et al, , p. 2336). Case studies like the Jutia survey are therefore deemed useful to drive progress from the mere detection of agriculture to the study of more complex issues such as land management and use.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agrarian landscapes in the Iberian Iron Age: Mountain communities and land use in southeastern Iberia

et al. 2018

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Agrarian landscapes are among the least understood features of first millennium B.C. societies in the western Mediterranean. Studies of such landscapes in the context of the Iberian Iron Age have been based essentially on the archeological record in places used for purposes other than farming, particularly settlements and areas reserved for burials and rituals, or on the identification of the possible use of fertilizers. Here we present a multiproxy analysis of an agrarian landscape based on geoarchaeological and paleoenvironmental studies in a mountainous region in southeastern Iberia. The findings confirmed the existence of farmland cultivated as early as the first millennium B.C. in the high Jutia Valley in the Spanish province of Albacete. These results suggest that coordinated analyses can be highly useful for identifying enduring agricultural practices, while contributing to a fuller understanding of western Mediterranean agrarian landscapes and their millenarian resilience, attributable to the coevolution of human communities and the environment.

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Long-term agrarian landscapes in the Troodos foothills, Cyprus

Cited by 27 publications

References 23 publications

Watery Entanglements in the Cypriot Hinterland

Watery Entanglements in the Cypriot Hinterland

A Review on Management Strategies of the Terraced Agricultural Systems and Conservation Actions to Maintain Cultural Landscapes around the Mediterranean Area

Agrarian landscapes in the Iberian Iron Age: Mountain communities and land use in southeastern Iberia

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