Manning/Critical Approaches, 4. Cypriot Iron Age Communities in Time and Place

The Bronze-to-Iron Age transition on Cyprus presents compelling opportunities for macrohistorical arguments of social and economic development across centuries of practice, but these narratives can attenuate the social actors and communities driving these transformations. A promising way to rethink temporal and spatial schemes is through the analysis of different communities and their landscapes, themes that A. Bernard Knapp has explored in several important contexts. How can we investigate the complexity of these communities in time and place? This paper prescriptively calls for more attention to building high-resolution chronological records as well as to studying the settlements and land use practices outside major Iron Age towns through comparative survey analysis. These archives and datasets provide windows into changes in community from the second to first millennia BCE and the differentiated ways that social groups fostered relationships with each other and with emerging authorities. Showcasing the interesting example of Amathus and its landscapes along the south-central coast, the paper briefly examines survey evidence from the Vasilikos and Maroni areas, where novel communities grew during the ninth and eighth centuries BCE, to discern variable place-making practices in one regional context.