Middle/Late Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age Cyprus: New Perspectives in Archaeological Theory and Technique - An Introduction

This presentation serves as an introduction to a PhD research project that has recently been started at the University of Edinburgh in regards to the operation, interactions and transformations of social structures and formations during the Middle/Late Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age on the island. It is observed that up to the present time a plethora of spatio-temporally and oftentimes theoretically limited and frequently incongruent or even conflicting theories have been proposed regarding the form, historical trajectories and transformations of the social groupings inhabiting Cyprus in the aforesaid periods. Nevertheless a comprehensive, island-wide overview of the socio-political and cultural systems of the periods in question is still lacking, while the issue of the transition from the Late Chalcolithic to the Early Bronze Age is still under heated debate. In this short presentation I do not intend to critique the aforementioned theoretical propositions, nor present final findings, as the project is still at an incipient stage of data collection and assessment. However I aim to firstly outline research goals and working hypotheses, secondly present the theoretical substratum of the project, which aspires to fuse concepts from complexity theory, social networks analysis and cultural transmittance theory; and thirdly to delineate the methodological approach to be employed, which aims at a synthesis of archaeological research techniques ranging from pottery studies to spatial analysis and robust social networks statistics.