Kitchenalia in Bronze Age Cyprus

This article explores the materiality of food production and consumption within the household in Bronze Age Cyprus. The focus is on embodied encounters with the “stuff of food”—the pots, pans, and other kitchen implements that were used on a daily basis—and how these shaped people’s lives. Throughout the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, generations of families on Cyprus used Red Polished pottery to serve and consume food and drink: the round-bottomed pots were not designed to be laid on a table, indicative of the development of very specific customs of dining at home. The very limited range of pottery (wares and forms) available to the Early-Middle Cypriot householder suggests a monotone cultural experience. The introduction of vessels with flat bases or ring bases at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age might indicate a move to dining around a table—a radically different engagement with the physical, material world that undoubtedly affected social relations. This was accompanied by radical shifts in production practices—a move away from household production into the realm of craft specialists—alongside which there was an explosion in the range of tableware for consumption of food and drink and of utilitarian wares used within the kitchen. This article interrogates the implied transformations in the cultural knowledge embedded within people’s engagement with their material world and the very different visual and tactile experiences involved in the daily use of pottery in the Late Bronze Age Cypriot household

Beyond the 'Thingification' of Worlds: Archaeology and the New Materialisms

This paper considers the application of the New Materialisms within archaeology, primarily in response to Witmore’s influential discussion paper: Archaeology and the New Materialisms (2014), specifically his emphasis on things. This we demonstrate is peripheral to the main thrust of the New Materialisms discourse. We unravel complexities in the terminology and consider the etymological and epistemological framework of concepts such as matter and thing. This leads us to consider some important issues that arise applying Deleuzian assemblages to the archaeological record and the potential of employing Barad’s agential realist theory instead. Barad’s concept of phenomena moves beyond the notion of things as separate, bounded entities, emphasizing entanglements of matter, and illustrates how matter (including humans) co-create the material world. Our aim is to demonstrate how engaging with matter rather than things, enables us to better make sense of the material world and our place within it

Shifting Relations in Bronze Age Gaza: An Investigation into Egyptianizing Practices and Cultural Hybridity in the Southern Levant During the Late Bronze Age

This article explores how material culture is used to shape, mediate and transform social relations within contact zones. The aim is to highlight cultural hybridity, namely the material expression of new social practices within a colonial third space. It focuses on the Gaza region of the southern Levant during the later second millennium BC, a cosmopolitan period, illustrated by large-scale movement of goods, raw materials and exotic luxuries over vast distances around the East Mediterranean resulting in cultural connectivity. The Late Bronze Age in the Gaza region is also characterized by Egyptian colonial activity. Consequently, this article examines material evidence for the development of new social practices in the region and in particular the adoption of Egyptian(izing) exotica in the creation and mediation of new hybrid identities. Specifically, it explores the social life of objects at two important Late Bronze Age sites in the region: el-Moghraqa and Deir el-Bala

Considering cognitive skills in forensic practice

This thesis examined the role of intelligence, language and working memory in two areas of forensic practice; (i) suggestibility in primary school aged children, and (ii) young adult offenders. Together the results provide support for the inclusion of language and working memory assessments in the &lsquo;toolbox&rsquo; of forensic psychologists.<br /

Watery Entanglements in the Cypriot Hinterland

This paper examines how water shaped people’s interaction with the landscape in Cyprus during the Bronze Age. The theoretical approach is drawn from the new materialisms, effectively a ‘turn to matter’, which emphasises the very materiality of the world and challenges the privileged position of human agents over the rest of the environment. The paper specifically moves away from more traditional approaches to landscape archaeology, such as central place theory and more recently network theory, which serve to separate and distance people from the physical world they live in, and indeed are a part of; instead it focuses on an approach that embeds humans, and the social/material worlds they create, as part of the environment, exploring human interactions within the landscape as assemblages, or entanglements of matter. It specifically emphasises the materiality and agency of water and how this shaped people’s engagement with, and movement through, their landscape. The aim is to encourage archaeologists to engage with the materiality of things, to better understand how people and other matter co-create the material (including social) world

Feats of Clay: Considering the Materiality of Late Bronze Age Cyprus

This paper examines the materiality of the Cypriot Base Ring ware through the lens of the new materialisms. Specifically, it draws upon Bennett’s vibrant matter and thing-power, to explore how cultural and technological knowledges of Late Bronze Age Cyprus were informed through material engagements with clay. This approach highlights the agency of matter and illustrates how the distinct capacities of clay (working with water and fire) provoked, enabled and constrained potters’ behaviour, resulting in a distinctive pottery style that was central to the Late Cypriot social and material world. The aim is to demonstrate how people, materials and objects are all matter in relationship, drawing attention to the fluidity, porosity and relationality of the material world

Exploring Aredhiou: New Light on the Rural Communities of the Cypriot Hinterland during the Late Bronze Age

This paper explores social practices and the material world at Aredhiou Vouppes, a Late Bronze Age rural community in the Cypriot hinterland. In-depth analysis of the excavation results demonstrates that this site was more complex than current typologies of inland production centres, based mainly on survey data, would suggest. Instead it was multi-functional and played an important economic role within the wider Cypriot landscape. This paper explores the evidence for initial occupation at Aredhiou during MC III-LC I, but the main focus is on the substantial LC IIC remains. Through a detailed contextual analysis, and the identification of a multiplicity of activities practiced at the site, it examines social practice, gender relations and ritual performance within a small farming community