Dream Archaeology on Cyprus

This week has been not particularly productive in terms of reading or writing, but I did have a chance to read Michael Given’s recent article in T. Kiely, A. Reeve, and L. Crewe’s edited volume, Empire and Excavation. Critical Perspectives on Archaeology in British-Period Cyprus, 1878–1960 (Leiden: 2025): “Over the landscape, in the landscape? Knowledge and agency in Cypriot archaeology, 1870–1910.”

The article considers the role of Cypriots in developing the archaeology of the island during the British period. Given not only follows the well-understood practice of reading against the grain of texts to find traces of local knowledge in the more formal, colonial, and disciplinary language of archaeologists. Where Given really shines, though, is his understanding that archaeological knowledge even in a colonial context emerges through the interaction of multiple actors. In other places, Given describes this as convivial especially when some of the agents are objects. In this contribution, he focuses on the interplay between Cypriot and colonial knowledge making.

In one example, the place names on the Kitchener map of the island reflect more than just topographic traditions, but local naming practices in the landscape. In another, George McFadden, the excavator at Kourion in the 1950s, representing the University of Pennsylvania, used local dialectical terms for hawthorne — muşmula — that indicates more than just a botanical understanding of local plants, but one grounded in conversations with his Greek collaborators, workers, and friends. 

In Polis, Munro and Tubbs acquired the services of Gregorios Antoniou for his skill as an excavator of tombs. Antoniou had worked previously with Ohnefalsch-Richter, Hogarth, Arthur Evans, and Leonard Woolley. Given suggests, quite reasonably, that Antoniou’s excavation skills developed not simply owing to his time on colonial excavations, but through his “own unlicensed digging.” Of course, this unlicensed digging has both meaning and value primarily within a colonial context through which licenses are issued and certain kinds of artifacts are valued.

The final section of Given’s piece goes beyond the kind of archaeology mediated by colonial priorities. Here the discovery of the tombs of saints — sometimes made possible through dreams — created sites of healing and veneration. Given notes the tombs of Ayios Konstantinos and his fellow-martyrs in the village of Ormidhia near where we worked for many years at Pyla-Koutsopetria. Of course, the story of the discovery of the tomb of St. Barnabas in 488 which was guided by a vision of the saint. Here we see a tradition of indigenous archaeology that isn’t tied to emerging disciplinary practices but embedded in another tradition both anticipates, in some ways (as articulated by Y. Hamilakis in his various efforts to define an indigenous archaeology), and operates outside of disciplinary practice. Instead, it remains embedded in the social experiences, expectations, and knowledge of communities that existed before and within the colonial encounter.