FRIENDS OF ASOR WEBINARS
Twenty Years of Archaeology at a Southern Coastal Site on Cyprus
Friends of ASOR present the next webinar in the 2023-2024 season on March 7, 2024, at 6:00 pm EST, presented by Dr. William Caraher, Dr. Thomas Landvatter, Dr. R. Scott Moore and Dr. Brandon R. Olson.
For the last two decades, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project has explored the coastal region of Pyla village. Located 10 km east of Larnaka and immediately below the famous Late Bronze Age site atop the Kokkinokremos coastal ridge, Koutsopetria featured a now-infilled embayment which likely served as a harbor in antiquity. The location of the site near an ancient harbor and astride the major road running between the ancient cities of Kition and Salamis likely led to the fortification of the prominent coastal height of Vigla in the Hellenistic period. This site likely served as strategic outpost for mercenaries during the tumultuous period after Alexander the Great’s death when his successors battled for control over the island and the Mediterranean littoral. The forces occupying the fort appear to have abandoned it within a generation of its construction leaving behind a fascinating window into the tumultuous life of this strategic site.
During the Roman and Late Roman periods, a prosperous town developed in the coastal zone. Excavations in the 1990s by the Department of Antiquities revealed parts of an Early Christian basilica and the intensive survey carried out by our team showed that the site had trade connections across the Mediterranean. The rise and decline of the Roman period settlement at Koutsopetria was less abrupt than that of its Hellenistic predecessor on Vigla, but our work at Koutsopetria similarly offers a window into an era of significant change on the island. Our excavations and survey at Koutsopetria have revealed that the church and surrounding settlement likely experienced a gradual abandonment over the course of the 7th and 8th centuries. This suggests that the site did not succumb to a catastrophic end at the hands of Arab raiders, but declined gradually perhaps as a result of the changing economic and political landscape of the region.
This talk will interweave the story of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project with our understanding of the history of the site during the Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Roman periods.
R. Scott Moore is Distinguished University Professor of History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Thomas Landvatter is Associate Professor of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Humanities at Reed College.
William Caraher is Associate Professor and teaches in the Department of History and American Indian Studies at the University of North Dakota.
Brandon R. Olson is Assistant Professor of History at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Combined they have over a half-century of archaeological experience on Cyprus and elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean. Starting in 2003, Caraher and Moore co-directed the Pyla-Koustopetria Archaeological Project on Cyprus with David Pettegrew. Since 2018, the project has continued under the direction of Olson, Landvatter, and education director Justin Stephens.
This webinar will be recorded and all paid registrants will be sent a link to view the recording.
*Please log in to the Online Portal BEFORE registering for the webinar. Once you have logged in, you will be able to register under our Events page linked above.
ASOR Sustaining Members: $0 | ASOR Members: $6.50 | Public: $13
Season Pass: ASOR Sustaining Members: $0 | ASOR Members: $75 | Public: $155
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All proceeds from this webinar are used to fund scholarships for members as well as increasing ASOR’s online resources, which are free to the public.
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Buy a season pass for all the webinars* of the 2023-2024 FOA Webinar Season! With a season pass, you will automatically be registered for every webinar in the season, and you will receive the recording of each webinar automatically after the event.
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Several levels of support from $50-$1,000 are available. Proceeds go towards membership scholarships and towards increasing ASOR’s virtual resources. Each sponsorship is tax-deductible and you can give your friends free registrations to a webinar! Sponsor a webinar here.
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Season Sponsorships are also available from the ASOR Online Store here!
Bronze level: $750
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After you sign up for a sponsorship online or over the phone, email the names and email addresses of your guests to Katherine Schmitt at membership@asor.org, who will send your guests a confirmation and the Zoom link before the webinar.
Curating an exhibition of contemporary art comes with the incredible opportunity of collaborating with living artists to realize together how to give voice and vision to their work. Doing so in the space of an archaeological museum brings with it the added opportunity to revisit and reevaluate traditional object narratives and museological methods. For centuries Western cultural institutions and museum exhibitions have advanced historical narratives of ancient West Asia with a singular, authoritative voice, predominantly disconnected from the present. Contemporary installations have the power to forefront and celebrate the complexity and continuity of this rich cultural heritage, presenting postcolonial perspectives and thought-provoking artistic responses that draw on diverse lived experiences, memories, and imagination.
In this webinar, Kiersten Neumann will discuss powerful examples of the pairing of contemporary art and archaeological objects from her own experience as an art historian, archaeologist, and curator, demonstrating some of the ways in which such contemporary interventions, including those by local and diaspora artists and communities, can bring a uniquely humanizing perspective to this history.
The Bat landscape of northwestern Oman is one of dense archaeological remains and diverse ecological conditions. The site has been a centre for human activity since the Paleolithic, most famously attested by the Early Bronze Age tombs, towers, and settlement of the UNESCO World Heritage zone. With the support of the US National Endowment for the Humanities, ongoing work by the Bat Archaeological Project aims to reconstruct the site’s Umm an-Nar period (ca. 2700-2000 BC) cultural landscape and the human-environment interactions that led to its creation and resilience.
The concept of resilience, or the ability of a system to persist and thrive even in the face of perturbations, can be applied to both natural ecosystems and human communities in ancient and modern times. A program of interdisciplinary collaborations integrating geomorphological, archaeobotanical, and phytolith analysis with remote sensing and traditional excavation of domestic spaces on the Bat landscape allows us to trace the arc of Umm an-Nar period activity at Bat alongside its changing environment. A parallel program of ecological survey assessing modern biological (floral and faunal) and hydrological resiliency provides a framework for understanding Bat’s history as a centre for human-environment interaction in the Umm an-Nar period. This lecture will discuss preliminary results of three seasons of resiliency studies at Bat and consider what lessons in adapting to aridity we, as a modern community, can learn from the people of third millennium BCE Arabia.
Jennifer Swerida holds a PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University with a focus on the archaeology of Arabia. Her research reorients traditional disciplinary boundaries by using insights from the Environmental Humanities to investigate the impact of mobile peoples in the formation of the cultural landscape(s) that shaped the history and culture of West Asia in the third millennium BCE. Her work specifically addresses groups that are underrepresented in modern scholarship, particularly those that occupied areas traditionally considered marginal or peripheral to state-level societies. Working within the landscape-household continuum of social archaeology, Dr. Swerida studies how people in these areas developed cultural mechanisms and socioecological strategies that enabled them to thrive and interact as peers with neighboring states. As Director of the Bat Archaeological Project, she is investigating the emergence of social complexity and cultural adaptations to aridity at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat in Oman. She is a Consulting Scholar for the University of Pennsylvania Museum and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University.
