Watery Entanglements in the Cypriot Hinterland

Abstract

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...

The River as an Economic Asset: Settlement and Society in the Xeros Valley in Cyprus

“…Rivers, incorporated into social and ecological developments, were particularly vibrant elements in periods of economic crisis, stability and growth. Water and rivers are understood to have specific powers and agencies related both to life and destruction [11,86]. The management of riverine water, such as the cases of Ottoman watermills both in the Xeros and the nearby Pentaschoinos valleys for example (Figure 29), should be scaled at the level of its associated communities and environments.…”

“…We also hope to be able to integrate geophysics and other disciplines into our study area in the future: The integration of zooarchaeology, archaeobotany and ethnoarchaeology in Cyprus, for example, has recently shown Future research should also integrate survey data with geological investigation, considering that some rivers along the southeast coast may (at least seasonally and/or simply via land routes) relate with a system of identified anchorages, used in conjunction with overland portages for transporting timber, copper, and other goods downstream to the coast for processing and cabotage [8] (cf. [9][10][11]). Although there is no evidence for built harbours, A. Bernard Knapp notes that several potential harbourages have been identified along the south coast between Palaipaphos and Hala Sultan Tekke [12] (pp.…”

Central Place Theory Reloaded and Revised: Political Economy and Landscape Dynamics in the Longue Durée

“…It is also in this context that Anna-Katharina Rieger [103] in the present volume examines two arid, un-central and supposedly marginal regions in Greco-Roman Syria and Egypt to understand settlement patterns and economic practices, successfully providing a showcase of resource management (i.e., water) and social organisation. On the other hand, Louise Steel [104] in this volume examines how water shaped people's interaction with the landscape in Bronze Age Cyprus and moves away from 'traditional' approaches to landscape archaeology by emphasising the agency of water and how this shaped people's movement through their landscape.…”

‘Un-Central’ Landscapes of NE-Africa and W-Asia—Landscape Archaeology as a Tool for Socio-Economic History in Arid Landscapes

“…In searching for interactions, relationships, and connections, historians and archaeologists use approaches from network analysis [41,42]. The much more dynamic picture derived from network graphs than from nested geometric graphs of CPT accounts for the more dynamic view of inter-human-landscape interactions [37,43,44], upon which landscape archaeology is mainly concentrated. The less hierarchical view practiced in network analysis focuses on the interdependencies instead of monodirectional pathways.…”

“…The less hierarchical view practiced in network analysis focuses on the interdependencies instead of monodirectional pathways. However, when archaeologists and historians study landscapes, trade connections, settlements, and land use as patterns, as well as the distribution patterns of objects, they tend to investigate the nodes and hubs in the network instead of the edges [44]. They do not consider the factors, phenomena, or impacts by which the edges are, or can be, formed and influenced [45,46] (p. 170 with n. 5, for scaled approaches).…”