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The view from CAARI's deck is clouded, like many from our own lives this year. But sunshine is bursting through. CAARI's fall season is full of new and exciting opportunities for ALL of us to share. CAARI now has a YouTube channel:
Its first offering, Dr. Nicholas Stanley-Price's standing-room-only CAARI lecture of 2018, 'The Other Cesnola: the arrest and trial of Alessandro Palma di Cesnola for illicit excavation,' is available on it right now. The next-as you'll read in her research report below-will be on October 22 by our Peltenburg Fellow, Dr. Artemis Georgiou. Congratulate Artemis on receiving, along with the Peltenburg Fellowship, a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Grant! In November, as you'll read in the Director's Report, our international conference on Cypriot archaeology and British rule will be available online, too.
But this is just the beginning. CAARI fully expects to welcome fellows to residence and research next fall. Fellowship opportunities and application deadlines are outlined just below. The Director's Report follows, and then the activities of the Institute unfold: you can read how our indomitable 2020 fellows have triumphed over COVID-19 impediments to produce significant research, and hear from co-editors and CAARI Trustees, Dr. Zuzana Chovanec and Dr. Walter Crist, about their eagerly awaited volume of symposium papers honoring CAARI's longtime and much esteemed Director, Dr. Stuart Swiny. We close with the words of Stuart Swiny himself in a tribute to CAARI's deft and dynamic first President, Norma Kershaw, who left us in September, still a "firecracker" at 95.
It's Time to Apply for CAARI Fellowships!
Encourage your colleagues, students, and friends to apply for CAARI's fellowships. Information about each grant, including application forms, stipends, and expectations, is available at: www.caari.org/fellowships.
The grants include:
- Three graduate student stipends offering support for travel to Cyprus and lodging at CAARI. Application deadline: December 7, 2020.
- Two CAARI/CAORC postdoctoral fellowships that fund a month's research in Cyprus: Application deadline: January 12, 2021.
- The postdoctoral fellowship in honor of Professor Eddie Peltenburg, that can support a full academic year's research time on Cyprus. Application deadline: January 12, 2021.
- Scholar in Residence: Application deadline: January 12, 2021.
Other relevant fellowship opportunities are listed on the Fellowships page, as well.
Browse the possibilities, and apply!
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Message from CAARI's Director
Dear friends and supporters of CAARI,
Here in Nicosia we're missing our friends and colleagues but keeping busy getting ourselves ready to provide some fantastic online Cypriot archaeology content. Our first online lecture is scheduled for this month from our 2020 Peltenburg Fellow Artemis Georgiou and she tells us about her topic below. In December, we will hear from our inaugural 2019 Peltenburg Fellow, Anna Spyrou, who will share some of the exciting results of her fellowship research with a lecture entitled 'From South Asia to the Eastern Mediterranean: Zebu cattle in iconography and nature of Bronze Age Cyprus'. We've already lined up a few speakers for early 2021 and we'll keep you posted on the dates and topics for those in the coming months.
Between our lectures, we're excited (and a bit nervous) to be hosting our first online webinar conference, co-organised with Thomas Kiely of the British Museum and this year's Danielle Parks Memorial graduate student Fellow, Anna Reeve: Empire and excavation: critical perspectives on archaeology in British-period Cyprus, 1878-1960. This was to have been a packed two days of papers in the CAARI library but as we cannot meet in person we are dividing the conference into smaller online sections. The first sessions will be held on the original conference dates of 6-7 November, sandwiched between midday and 2pm Cyprus time to be friendly to as many time zones as possible. The content includes two keynote addresses, one from Michael Given of the University of Glasgow and the other from Juliette Desplat of the National Archives UK, and eight short research papers, allowing people to present either their finished research or a work in progress. We plan to hold at least one further session in January as participants ready their papers and we are very keen to also hold the event live in Cyprus in November 2021.
We will be posting the links for all the online content to this Newsflash list so you will have the opportunity to join us. If you don't currently receive the notices for lectures and would like to ensure that you do, whether online or back in the CAARI library in the future, please send an email to librarian@caari.org.cy and Katerina will add you to the lecture list. In the meanwhile, for those who have not yet engaged with Zoom, it is free to download and straightforward to use so why not download it in advance of the lecture dates and spend a little time familiarizing yourselves with this tool before the day. As noted in the introduction, we've started our own YouTube channel to ensure that those who can't join our events live will still have an opportunity to view them at their leisure. Gloria London has kindly offered us her video on traditional Cypriot pottery to upload and if others have interesting Cypriot archaeology or traditional crafts content that you would be happy for us to host, please do get in touch.
From all of us at CAARI, we hope that everyone is doing as well as you can be and we look forward to meeting up, online for now and in person before too long.
Lindy Crewe, PhD
Director, CAARI
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Fellows' Research Reports: COVID-19 be not Proud!
Cassandra Donnelly
University of Texas at Austin
The Helena Wylde Swiny and Stuart Swiny Fellowship
My time as the Helena Wylde Swiny and Stuart Swiny Fellow was productive, if under circumstances none of us could have imagined when the fellowship was awarded. I had initially planned to spend my fellowship at CAARI in June 2020 after having spent fall and winter at CAARI under the auspices of an AIA Fellowship. In between March and June, I was set to travel to Sardinia, Athens, and Paris.
When COVID-19 spread in Europe in Early March, I made the decision to stay in Cyprus, where I would be safe, rather than return to the US. I am grateful to Lindy and Vathoulla and everyone at CAARI for allowing me and the other "CAARIntiners", as we called ourselves (sorry!), to quarantine there. We were a hodgepodge crew who took care of CAARI and one another. We worked in the library, daily, to the best our concentration would allow during these strange times. Having the run of things while Photoulla was unable to come to work was a privilege and a pleasure, even if it was impossible to keep the building to her standards.
Over the fall and winter in Cyprus, I had been working on my dissertation on Cypro-Minoan potmarks and their relationship to the Cypro-Minaon script. Potmarks refer to incised or painted marks found on both closed and open vessels. These marks are either single signs drawn from the Cypro-Minoan script or marks with no evident relation to the script. My dissertation looks at the interface between Cypro-Minoan inscriptions and potmarks to reconstruct how Cypriots transmitted the art of writing as the Bronze Age empires collapsed. This spring, through CAARI's extensive collection of excavation reports, I was able to pursue several lines of research, some of which fed directly into my dissertation and some of which became or will become publications or lectures. My major research accomplishments in the library were 1) reviewing the findspots of the potmarks; 2) correcting the findspots of clay balls from the Sanctuary of the Ingot God at Enkomi; 3) identifying new vessel inscriptions; and 4) submitting my first peer-reviewed publication.
I am especially proud of the correction I was able to make in the findspots of the clay balls from Enkomi's Sanctuary of the Ingot God.
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Inscribed clay balls (London, British Museum)
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The clay balls are the most numerous Cypro-Minoan inscription type, with 91 examples. They are a unique inscription medium within the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean, which means there are no comparable examples, and we do not know their function. They are fired clay balls, approximately 2 cm in diameter, that were impressed when the clay was wet with inscriptions 3-8 signs in length. About half of the inscriptions contain abbreviations, a single sign set apart by a word divider, and around half the balls contain either repeated sign sequences or repeated abbreviations. The phenomenon of repetitions allows us to consider the content of the balls even though we have not deciphered the script. We can map the archaeological relationships between the balls with repeated sequences. This approach is especially fruitful with respect to the Sanctuary of the Ingot God, where 23 balls have been found in different rooms. The 23 balls were found sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, or in loose groups of up to five. Up until now, however, we have relied on incorrect records of which balls were found with which. Through carefully reading both the published and unpublished excavation reports at CAARI, I was able to reconstruct the correct findspots of the balls and therefore show how the repeated sequences and abbreviations relate to each other.
The reevaluation of the ball findspots has culminated in my first peer-reviewed publication, the chapter "Repetition, Sortition, and Abbreviations in the Cypro-Minoan Script" in Repetition, Communication, and Meaning in the Ancient World, a volume edited by Deborah Beck that will be published by Brill in the coming months. I show that the repeated sign sequences are evenly spread throughout the site of Enkomi, but that the repeated abbreviations are found concentrated together in groups. I argue that this phenomenon/pattern supports the claim made by Silvia Ferrara and Miguel Valério that the balls were likely used as lots. While this conclusion is necessarily tentative barring decipherment or the discovery of new parallels in the archaeological records of deciphered scripts, it is exciting to be able to support an old hypothesis with new evidence.
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Rafael Laoutari
University of Cambridge
Anita Cecil O'Donovan Fellowship
Based on the recent museum exhibition at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, 'Cyprus, A Dynamic Island,' Cyprus has been characterised as dynamic. Nevertheless, when the narrative focuses on the prehistoric periods and the lives of people, this dynamism often gets lost. This could be the product of a long-lived emphasis placed by the archaeologists on state, urban and complex societies, often claimed to be emerging in Cyprus during the Late Bronze Age. My PhD thesis, 'Social Dynamics in non-urban societies: a multi-scalar analysis of social interaction in Prehistoric Bronze Age Cyprus,' focuses on the period before the appearance of urbanism and aims to indicate the dynamic nature of the social interaction present and negotiated in and among the numerous communities of the island over time. The main concepts in the heart of this approach are practices and identities meshed together into the complex and multi-faceted life of the people of this period. This investigation focuses on the study of ceramics, 'individualized' artifacts and iconography from both habitational and mortuary contexts around the island.
Thanks to the Anita Cecil O'Donovan Fellowship, during my stay in CAARI (February-May 2020), I undertook the study of hundreds of artifacts from a number of sites of this period. I primarily focused my research on legacy material (e.g. Bellapais, Philia, Vasilia), and secondly, on material originating from more recent excavations (e.g. Limassol, Larnaca, Psematismenos, Deneia, etc.). During the countless morning hours spent in the 'apotheke' of the Cyprus Museum, and in the Larnaca and the Limassol district Museums, I acquired numerous skills associated with the study of Bronze Age artifacts (especially the highly challenging Red Polished pottery). Then, during the long afternoons that followed, the CAARI library served as an intellectual hub, where the newly collected raw data, the numerous site publications, the most up to date literature on Cypriot archaeology, and the discussions with fellow researchers meshed together for the development of multiple ideas associated both with my PhD thesis and potential future projects. Perhaps, what may prove to be among the most intriguing questions that emerged is associated with the simple bowls present in almost every context of this period. How much information can they really give us about chronology, the practices people were engaged in, the regional differences, etc.
What would we learn about the lives of the people of this period if we followed the development of this pottery shape over time and space? The matter is complicated in many different ways, ranging from the dating of the individual artifacts, the type of recording undertaken by the previous scholars and me, the distribution of the various sub-types around the island, etc. Moreover, such an approach demands a thorough analysis of a huge dataset as well as comparisons with other pottery shapes and artifacts in order to provide a solid argument. Still, though, the seed for this research has been planted and the fruits will hopefully be enjoyed in my PhD thesis.
In the meantime, I also fulfilled a small ethnoarchaeological study related with the traditional production of halloumi in Cyprus. The primary question asked was: "What can we learn for the lives of the people practicing dairying in prehistoric societies by investigating the traditional household production of halloumi in Cyprus". The outcome of this study is the article 'Cheese-scapes: an ethnoarchaeological study of the traditional production of halloumi in Cyprus' which will be published in the next volume of the Archaeological Review from Cambridge. For the needs of this study, I visited a traditional halloumi-making workshop located in the village of Avgorou. There, I participated in and recorded a session of halloumi making as well as interviewed the people involved in this procedure.
Finally, perhaps the most valuable part of my CAARI experience was the people I met and the places I visited in Cyprus. Starting from the amazing staff of CAARI and the fellow scholars that I met there (with some of them we even quarantined together during the COVID-19 lockdown) to the various archaeologists, technicians and staff in the numerous museums and archaeological sites of Cyprus, I would like to express my gratitude for all their help, interesting discussions and fruitful advices they provided. All these people and places made me discover the real nature of Cypriot Archaeology and for this reason I am more than grateful to the CAARI Fellowship Committee for making such an experience possible.
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Interregional Connectivity in Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean: Canaanite and Egyptian Jars from Dikaios' Excavations at Enkomi
Edgar J. Peltenburg Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cypriot Prehistory
Since the beginning of September, I have been working at CAARI as the recipient of the 2020 postdoctoral fellowship that was established to honor the memory of the late Professor Edgar J. Peltenburg and to support young scholars focusing on the study of Cypriot Prehistory. The aim of my research project here at CAARI is to provide a comprehensive study of vessels designated as "Maritime Transport Containers", found at the Late Bronze Age site of Enkomi, that is to say between 1650-1050 BC. Maritime Transport Containers are special-function vessels that were used for the maritime transport of goods across the Mediterranean. In the chronological context of the Late Bronze Age, the most common Maritime Transport Containers are the so-called "Canaanite Jars" produced in multiple centers across the Levantine coast, as well as the "Egyptian Jars", originating from New Kingdom Egypt, and "Transport Stirrup Jars" mostly made in Minoan Crete. The study of these imported vessels from the cosmopolitan settlement of Enkomi will provide critical new data on the evolution of ancient maritime trade in the eastern Mediterranean.
In the little time that has passed since the beginning of my postdoctoral fellowship, I have managed to establish a relational database where all the critical new data will be inserted and make good progress with the hands-on study of the finds from Dikaios' excavations at Enkomi, currently kept at the storerooms of Terra Umbra in Larnaca and the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia. The aim of the study of the well-stratified levels of Enkomi is to identify morphological variations among the different categories, distinguish fabric groups, and shed light on the marking strategies involved.
As the Peltenburg Fellow in Cypriot Prehistory, I have benefited immensely from the excellent library and other facilities here at CAARI. I am also thoroughly enjoying interacting with the staff, residents and library users, although, admittedly, since the outbreak of the coronavirus and ensuing measures, CAARI has been particularly quiet, and far from the lively ambience everyone was accustomed to. I am taking this opportunity to express my gratitude to the director of CAARI, Lindy Crewe, for her guidance and support, as well as to Vathoulla and Katerina for welcoming me so warmly and facilitating my study.
On the 22nd of October I will deliver a lecture within the Autumn 2020 CAARI lecture series, which this year will be held online, in accord with the local measures on preventing the coronavirus spread. My presentation's topic concerns a highly intriguing group of storage vessels from Late Bronze Age Cyprus that feature elaborate pictorial depictions in relief, produced by the rolling of a cylinder-seal on the vessel's surface while still wet. The depictions are very imaginative and present chariot hunting scenes, bulls fighting, and humans fighting imaginary creatures. Through a contextual and methodological approach, my research aspires to decipher the powerful messages conveyed by these images and so to elucidate the role of these impressive vessels.
As a final note, I am very pleased to report that my application for a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant has been qualified to receive funding by the European Commission. ERC Starting Grants are highly competitive schemes that provide long-term funding to prominent young researchers across Europe, with the aim of enabling them to pursue their ambitious, advanced and unconventional academic research at the frontiers of knowledge. The objective of my ERC Starting Grant project is to provide new insights into the interregional commercial strategies and intercultural connectivity in the eastern Mediterranean during the period that spans the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age (ca. 1650-750 BC). The project will integrate high-end interdisciplinary approaches to the holistic study of Maritime Transport Containers from selected archaeological contexts in Cyprus and other regions of the eastern Mediterranean. The proposed research aspires to contribute to the disentanglement of Mediterranean interconnections during the second and early first millennia BC and elucidate aspects of ancient economy and connectivity. The project will be implemented in March 2021, with a budget of 1,254,300 Euros for a period of five years. Within the frame of this program, eight new research positions will be generated for doctoral students and postdoctoral associates, establishing Cyprus as a center for advanced archaeological research across Europe and the Middle East.
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All Things Cypriot: Studies on Ancient Environment, Technology, and Society in Honor of Stuart Swiny
Dr. Zuzanna Chovanec, Research Associate, The University at Albany,
Dr. Walter Crist, Maastricht Universty, The Netherlands
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Dr. Stuart Swiny in 1988, speaking with Dr. Jacques Claude Courtois
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In 2014, Dr. Stuart Swiny, former CAARI Director and prolific scholar of all things Cypriot, retired from the University at Albany, where he taught for 19 years. To commemorate the occasion, a symposium was held in his honor at the 2017 ASOR meeting in Boston, MA. It was organized by Zuzana Chovanec and Walter Crist, students of Stuart's who have held several research fellowships in Cyprus and are now Trustees of CAARI. They are the co-editors of the symposium volume, described here.
At the left you see Walter Crist, presenting in one of the symposium sessions. With the unfailing help of Stuart's wife Laina, who is also a well-known researcher of ancient Cyprus, and son Philip, we organized two sessions of papers in his honor and a party (at his house, no less), which we were all able to keep secret from him until the day before! If you know Stuart, you also know this is a great accomplishment. The whole event was a great success, gathering many colleagues, friends, and former students to reminisce on fond memories of Cyprus, archaeology, and CAARI. During the party at the Swiny house in Dover, Vathoulla Moustoukki, CAARI's administrator for over 40 years, presented Stuart with a book of memories, photos, and well wishes from colleagues and friends. Just below, at the right, you see her presenting it, with Zuzana Chovanec at center.
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The forthcoming book, entitled All Things Cypriot: Studies on Ancient Environment, Technology, and Society in Honor of Stuart Swiny, will be the next iteration of the CAARI Monograph Series published by ASOR - fitting venue for a series of papers celebrating Stuart's life and work. Of course, Stuart's story is also Laina's, and she is prominently recognized throughout the book. The volume comprises 18 chapters, some based on papers given at the ASOR symposium and others furnished by colleagues who had not been able to come to Boston. Contributors include long-time colleagues and friends, former students, and past and present CAARI Trustees. Publication was made possible through the generous support of the Institute of Cypriot Studies, at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY).
Though Stuart's specialty is the Early Bronze Age, his interest extended to all periods. From supporting the discovery of an Epi-Palaeolithic human presence on the island, to knowledge of traditional technologies on modern Cyprus and relationships with Cypriots in the communities where he lived and worked, Stuart, and Laina with him, are widely knowledgeable on all aspects of the island's culture. The scope of the book, therefore, covers all periods of human activity on Cyprus, stretching from early prehistory, through the Bronze Age, extending into modern ethnographic work within living memory, and indeed looking to the future of archaeological work on the island.
The book is divided into six sections. Section 1, "The Life and Legacy of Stuart Swiny," lays out Stuart's journey to Cyprus, his time as CAARI Director, his career at the University at Albany, and his work since his retirement. Section 2, "Human-Environment Interactions on Cyprus," highlights Stuart's prescient interest in the environment, covering topics of climate change, archaeological survey, and the exploitation of resources in prehistory, which today is of much greater focus in archaeological research than it was at the time. The third section, "Social Use and Organization of Space," focuses on one of Stuart's strengths as an archaeologist: settlement archaeology. These papers discuss the interpretation and use of space within Bronze Age settlements, as displayed by their material culture: play, production, and hospitality are all brought to life through innovative approaches to relevant material culture. Stuart's firm grounding in the interpretation of material culture is the subject of Section 4, "Material Culture Studies," where topics of textiles, opium, and pottery are approached through interdisciplinary concepts and innovative techniques. Stuart was keenly aware of Cyprus' role within the wider Mediterranean region, with a particular interest in seafaring - no doubt connected to Laina's work on the Kyrenia ship! This is reflected in Section 5, "Regional Interactions," which includes papers on the circulation of Cypriot coinage in the Late Archaic, iconography of date-palms on pottery, and a diachronic study on the Cypriot carob trade. The final section addresses the future of Cypriot archaeology with papers that deal with the research potential of Sotira Kamihnoudhia, Stuart's major excavation site, as well as a retrospective by Bernard Knapp, who reflects on the past 40 years of Cypriot archaeology, and peers into the future to see what archaeology in Cyprus could and should look like.
The book will be a fitting reflection of the wide-ranging effect Stuart has had on the archaeology of Cyprus; not just directly through his excavation and survey work and time as Director of CAARI, but in the way he challenged conventional thinking, fostered new ideas, and encouraged students and established scholars. CAARI and the practice of Cypriot archaeology certainly would not be the same without him. There are many in the archaeological community and on the island who would say that he has left his mark on their lives, both professionally but also personally. We hope that this book provides an adequate tribute to his consequential work, while also bringing a little bit of fun, as is so characteristic of Stuart!
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Remembering Norma Kershaw
Norma Kershaw taught at Hofstra and Adelphi Colleges in New York, excavated at Gezer in Israel, participated in digs in Israel and Cyprus, and was a Trustee of ASOR for 40 years. But she was even more important to CAARI.
Norma Kershaw's pivotal rôle in the early years of CAARI's existence is little known today. Indeed, she chaired the ASOR committee that explored the possibility of establishing a foreign school on Cyprus and she would become the Institute's first president.
Already at that time Norma enjoyed a solid knowledge of the island, having previously excavated at Kition for Dr. Vassos Karageorghis--with whom she
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| | Norma Kershaw with Anita Walker, CAARI Trustees Joan and Dick Scheuer, Phil King, and Ted Campbell (ASOR Vice President) |
remained friends thereafter--as a member of the Brock Practicum. She would visit Cyprus on a regular basis as recorded in this photograph from The House of the Dancing Bird, where she is seen in 1979, beaming at the entrance to CAARI's first home on King Paul Street next to its Director, Anita Walker, on her right and ASOR President Phil King behind. In Cyprus again three years later, she played a pivotal role in an event which was to shape the future success of CAARI. That summer Ronald Ungaro, Chief of the Academic Exchange Program (USIA), visited the island and Norma joined a tour I organized to various excavations, ending with a dinner with Vassos Karageorghis at Kourion followed by his lecture in its Roman theatre. Norma, the consummate communicator, helped convey to an already impressed Ungaro the significance of CAARI as a positive American presence on Cyprus. As a result, we were soon to benefit from crucial support for operations, for the library and for much more besides.
Norma was sincerely attached to Cyprus and enjoyed friendships with a number of people on the island. She is seen at the center of the photograph below, very much in her milieu with a quintessential Cypriot landscape as a backdrop and surrounded by archaeologists while visiting Michael Toumazou's excavations near Athienou in October 1990.
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Norma Kershaw with John Leonard, Napoleon and Michael Given at left, and Michael Toumazou and Vathoulla Moustoukki at right
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Norma had spirit, wide ranging interests (she once showed me with justifiable pride her original David Roberts The Holy Land folios) and an appreciation for the simple things in life, which remained undimmed in her later years. I well remember finding her sitting quietly on the perimeter of a reception at the San Antonio ASOR meetings and asking if she would like "the usual". She perked up and replied "yes of course" and we enjoyed a gin and tonic together, the last of many we shared over the years that we had known each other.
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Fellowships are the future of CAARI's dynamism!
It's thrilling to look back over the intellect, collegiality, and hard work that have characterized CAARI's life. It's even more exciting to watch the CAARI process happen, as in the reports here, with students becoming scholars, fellowships becoming published chapters, and chapters becoming books. Absolutely crucial to this effectiveness are CAARI's fellowships. Help keep our fellowships strong. Rising prices and dwindling alternative resources are making our fellowships ever harder to maintain. We need your support badly, and will be deeply appreciative of all that you can give.
Young scholars know all too well how hard it is to eke out a research plan without support. So make it a point to set aside a bit each year to safeguard the ongoing possibility of fellowships. Don't discount the power of a small gift! $20 or $30 each from the senior scholars of the future would accomplish so much to be sure CAARI experience is still available: for your own research, and for those whom you hope will follow you in the future.
To all our valued donors: Look at the intellectual work that your help is fostering here. This is what we exist for. We thank you for all that you have contributed to CAARI's work. To all who help CAARI sustain this potent mission: thank you for your generous participation!
Annemarie Weyl Carr
CAARI VP
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