Bronze Age Village Life and Rural Ecology on Cyprus: Excavations at Politiko Troullia

Description:
With support from the National Science Foundation, Drs. Steven Falconer, Patricia Fall and an international team of colleagues will conduct field research in 2007 to study village agricultural development on Cyprus before the advent of cities. One of the most important legacies of early civilization is the establishment of the agricultural lifeways that have molded the natural and social landscapes we live in today. In the Near East, ancient agricultural intensification played a particularly important role in the evolution of urban-rural interactions and anthropogenic landscapes. A substantial body of theory and case studies highlights cities as the primary agents of agricultural change and landscape formation. New collaborative research on Cyprus will investigate pivotal aspects of agricultural change that may have proceeded independently of urban influences, reflecting paths of relatively autonomous rural change that lay at the foundation of agrarian civilizations.

Previous archaeological studies of farming villages in Jordan directed by Falconer and Fall (and supported by NSF) detail agricultural strategies and landscape changes during the advent of urbanized society in the Bronze Age (ca. 2300-1500 B.C.). New investigations will consider whether comparable independent trends characterize contemporaneous Bronze Age agriculture on Cyprus (ca. 2500-1700 B.C.) prior to the development of cities and their influences. The results of this new research in an island setting on Cyprus will be compared to those from mainland Jordan, where villages adopted changing agricultural strategies and modified their landscapes in the social context of city growth and collapse. Contrasting results from Cyprus and Jordan will suggest fundamentally distinct courses of rural development in pre-urbanized (Cyprus) vs. urbanized (Jordan) societies. More provocatively, if similar trends do emerge, this result will strengthen our understanding of the independent rural agricultural dynamics that lay at the heart of early civilizations societies, whether in the context of urbanization or prior to its emergence.

Research plans feature a detailed mapping of surface and subsurface (using soil resistivity) architecture and archaeological excavation of the Early/Middle Bronze Age village of Politiko Troullia, Cyprus. This project builds on previous insights from Bronze Age villages in Jordan, as well as the results of initial survey and excavations at Troullia in 2004, 2005 and 2006. The major project goal is to explore Politiko Troullia as it illustrates the economic development of an agrarian village in Bronze Age pre-urban society on Cyprus. Special attention will be devoted to maximizing the recovery and interpretation of plant and animal remains as a means to infer strategies of village agriculture and their potential effects on surrounding landscapes.

This research involves an international collaboration between Arizona State University, the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus and the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, Nicosia. This project will train American and Cypriot undergraduate and graduate students in archaeological fieldwork and analysis. Dissemination of project results will include scientific publications, international conference presentations, website access and public lectures in the US and Cyprus. The broader benefits of this new research on Cyprus lie in 1) its rural perspective on agriculture and landscape formation, 2) its emphasis on household evidence of agricultural behavior, and 3) its unique comparison of the development of rural agrarian life and associated environmental consequences on the island of Cyprus and the continental Near East.