A Working Paper on Settlement on Cyprus in the 7th and 8th Centuries

Since we’re in excavation mode today after our spring storm yesterday, I’ll offer up a working paper for your inspection. The paper looks at settlement on Cyprus during the 7th and 8th centuries and argues three interrelated things.

First, it challenges the idea that scholars should consider Late Roman Cyprus to be normative and late-7th and 8th century Cyprus in decline. Cyprus during 5th-early 7th century experienced a rather extraordinary period of economic prosperity and economic integration with both the Roman state and markets across the Mediterranean basin. 

Next, I suggest that our inability to grasp the situation on Cyprus during the late 7th and 8th century (as well as our tendency to declare Cyprus in decline) exists at the intersection of archaeological methods and historical circumstances. Our tendency to rely on artifact that circulated widely in the Mediterranean to establish chronological control of sites on Cyprus and our inability to consistently recognize locally produced ceramics (except those produced Cyprus that circulated widely), created a situation where disruptions to the Mediterranean economy in the late 7th and 8th centuries disrupted our ability as archaeologists to study communities on Cyprus.

Finally, I follow the well-trod path of a gaggle of recent scholars who have suggested that there is evidence for continued economic activity in the late 7th and 8th centuries across the island, but we need to become more sensitized to the kinds of evidence present. Arab coins, handmade pottery, and late forms of well-known, earlier types will tell the story of a dynamic, persistent, if more contingent economy, during the so-called “Dark Ages.”

More on this paper here, here, here, and here.   

Or you can just read the working paper here:

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