Late Antique Mining on Cyprus

Like many scholars of ancient Cyprus, I’ve been fascinated by the rapidly expanding corpus of data on Roman and Late Roman mining practices on the island. Of course, even the most casual archaeologist on the island is bound to notice the nearly ubiquitous presence of slag in both archaeological and every day contexts. This detritus from the smelting process appears as weirdly bubbled, vaguely metallic lumps and was used as road “metalling” into the Modern period, is common in fill levels in Ancient and Medieval contexts, and generally traces the extent of metallurgical activities across the island. At the village of Polis (ancient Arsinoe), slag appears so frequently in archaeological contexts that it is often hard to know whether it represents particular activities associated with finds in a particular trench or was simply “residual material” representing the site’s proximity to copper rich veins in the Troodos Mountains and the role the metallurgy played in the region’s ancient and modern history.

Despite over a decade of working at Polis, slag was so common and mining activity in the region was so well known (highlighted by the famous Limni open pit mine), that I (perhaps ironically) never thought very much about slag other than to acknowledge its existence. This was not very smart.

I was really excited then to see a pair of recent publications on not only mining in the region, but mining in Late Antiquity. The first paper is the most immediately relevant. Authored by Anna-Maria Sdralia, Vasiliki Kassianidou, Thilo Rehren, and titled “Late Roman copper smelting in Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus,” it appeared in the Journal of Archaeological Science 48 (2023). My guess is that this paper represents part of her University of Cyprus Master’s Thesis: “Investigating two late Roman Metallurgical Slag Heaps: An Analytical Approach” (which I have not read, but I have downloaded).

The two slag heaps under investigation were at Argaka and the Pelethousa. Anna-Maria Sdralia and colleagues demonstrated that the two slag heaps consisted of slag that resulted from similar production processes which they date to the Late Roman period (3rd-8th century) on the island. This suggests that both piles of slag were not only broadly contemporary, but also represented a similar set of processes for extracting copper from the local ore. This involves the use of the manganese oxide as a flux in the smelting process. To be honest, I have no idea what this really means on a technical or technological level, but I can follow the authors’ conclusions. This makes it likely that copper extraction in Late Antiquity was organized at the regional level and perhaps reflects state involvement.

The Argaka slag heap, again, if I understand correctly, recently produced charcoal with radiocarbon dates into the 8th century. This is the latest carbon dated evidence for smelting on the island. The presence of such late carbon dates amid slag that shows continuity of manufacturing with the nearby Pelethousa slag heap (which produced carbon dates only as late as the 6th century) may suggest the continuity of large scale copper production in the 8th century in the region of Polis. Of course, the analysis conducted by Sdralia and her colleagues does hint that there is evidence that the smelting processes at the site may have changed at some point, and they, plausibly, suggest that this could have occurred in the later 7th and 8th centuries when military, political, and economic disruptions invariably compromised institutional involvement in metallurgical practices on the island.

But even acknowledging this suggestive evidence (and to be clear, I’m in no position to critique the science in this article), the continuity of slag disposal at Argaka seems to indicate that the disruptions experienced on the island in the 7th century — whether these represent the immediate impact of Arab raids or the generally weakening of the regional economy — did not immediately stop extractive industries in the region.

Vasiliki Kassianidou, one of the co-authors on the JAS article, makes this point in her contribution to the recent volume edited by Panayiotis Panayides and Ine Jacobs, Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity. Her article, “Mining and smelting copper in Cyprus in Late Antiquity” is an invaluable synthesis of recent evidence for both Late Roman and Medieval copper production on the island. She observes that the chronology from the Argaka slag heap coincides with our recent work at Polis that suggests, mostly on the basis of ceramic dates, that the site of Arsinoe continued to show resilience and perhaps even prosperity into the 8th century. 

Intriguingly, a cache of seals apparently found near Polis and dated to the 8th or even 9th century seem to suggest continued contact between the area and imperial administration in Constantinople. This is during a time when scholars have generally thought that the island was under continuous threat from Arab Raids or even under a kind of “condominium arrangement” where Byzantine and Arab states both had the right to tax the island, but also promised to limit the military (and presumably administrative) involvement there. 

It appears to me that there is a not insignificant body of evidence emerging from both excavated contexts, carbon dated slag heaps, and stray finds in the region of Polis for the area showing significant continuity, economic vitality, and institutional connectivity into the 8th century. This not only complicates the once tidy notion of radical discontinuity as a result of the Arab raids in the 7th century, but also creates a far more “fuzzy” (to use Jody Gordon’s happy terminology) understanding of the transition from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages on the island. It is a happy coincidence that my work with Scott Moore and the entire Princeton Cyprus Expedition team on the island seems to be poised to contribute to this conversation.