Episode 7 of Emerging Cypriot is now available. This episode begins a series which examines our daily fieldwork. Joe Patrow chose to focus his camera on the personalities involved in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project. Thus, for this short you get to meet Michael Brown who works with Dimitri Nakassis to study the Late Bronze Age aspect of the Pyla coastline. In particular, Michael and Dimitri are working to expand what we know about the site of Pyla-Kokkinokremos, a major Late Bronze Age site documented over the course of several excavations in the 1970s and 1950s (for more on the site see: V. Karageorghis and M. Demas, Pyla-Kokkinokremos : a late 13th-century B.C. fortified settlement in Cyprus. (Nicosia 1984)). Systematic intensive survey continue to reveal both additional chronological phases at the site, as well as information regarding the extent and nature of the prehistoric settlement there. Notice the stone basin that Mat Dalton, our illustrator, is reassembling in the final clips of the short.
Patrow also captures a bit of the journey to the site. On the day this was shot, Michael and Mat took the bus to site since the project cars were occupied elsewhere. There are some shots of the low coastal plains that are being rapidly built over as the city of Larnaka continues to expand to the east.
Finally, it has been particular fruitful to discuss with Michael the various ways to understand the construction of a fortified Late Bronze Age site on this stretch of coastline. The parallels with our newly discovered Late Roman fortifications on Vigla are striking. Both sites would have likely taken advantage of the new infilled embayment as a harbor, but this safe harbor would have also left both sites exposed to potentially hostile groups who wanted the wealth concentrated at the site on account of its advantageous location. Our collaboration with Michael and Dimitri who have sought to position the site in relation to both Aegean and Levantine civilizations has encouraged us to consider the links between the coastal area of Pyla and other prosperous networks of exchange in the Late Roman period as well (for our efforts along these lines see here).
A few technical notes
The video is all in QuickTime which you will need to download to watch it. If you right click and download the video, it is formatted for viewing on your iPod or even iPhone or iPod Touch. When a new installment is made, the image will become a rollover image. We'll add a short a week. I borrowed the idea for this format from a video series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. The center square in the last row is a link to the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project web page where you can read more about everything that you see in these film shorts.
We have posted a particularly frank interview with the director of Emerging Cypriot and Survey on Cyprus, and you can read the commentaries on the first six shorts (with links to those shorts) below.
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