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It's spring in Nicosia-the days are bright, the almond trees are in bloom, and the windows in the library are open to fresh air and bird song. For CAARI it's a season of busy anticipation, as plans progress for this summer's 40th Birthday festivities. Our news flash brings greetings from Director Lindy Crewe, and then Professor Pam Gaber introduces a brand new program that she has inaugurated at CAARI. After that, we'll look at birthday gifts to CAARI. We have a report on a truly stellar gift, made this spring. And then we offer some suggestions for gifts that each of you can consider.
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Message From the Director
Dear Friends and Supporters of CAARI:
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Lindy Crewe at the Bronze Age site of Marki-Alonia
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2018 is already well underway and here in Nicosia we started the year with the traditional blessing and cutting of the Vasilopita (New Year's cake) at the Archaeological Research Unit at the University of Cyprus. We also had our own delicious Vasilopita at CAARI, homemade by
Vathoulla. We've enjoyed a fairly mild winter and it feels like spring is now here. It is lovely to be out and about in the countryside, enjoying the green of the Cypriot landscape at these times of the year. I visited the site of my first student excavation at Early-Middle Cypriot Bronze Age Marki-
Alonia, with the lush green surrounding fields shown in the image.
The CAARI residence has also had a busy start to the year with a full house, including CAARI trustee Pam Gaber
's students featured here in this Newsflash, and some of our returning researchers. Another CAARI trustee, Chair of the Library and Collections Committee
Brian Shelburne
, spent a week here helping
Katerina Mavromichalou
with library matters-Brian in a yellow shirt and Katerina in blue are at work on the library in the photo at the top. Our first lecture in the spring program in February was given by previous CAARI Director and current trustee.
Tom Davis
, now of the Tandy Institute for Archaeology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth Texas, spoke on his research at Kourion with a lecture titled "Earthquakes and the Crises of Faith: Social Transformation in Late Antique Cyprus." Many of Tom's old friends came along and we had a lively discussion after the lecture.
Our exciting news is that our petrographic thin section lab is up and running. The purchase was funded by a Title VI grant from the US Department of Education, for which CAARI is extremely grateful. The equipment will be used for making thin sections of various materials (including pottery, bone, soil, stone, metals) to mount on slides for analysis with a microscope. These include investigations of location or techniques of manufacture, or questions on composition and structure. This is the only archaeological thin section lab on Cyprus. There are already several graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from the Archaeological Research Unit and the Engineering Department of the University of Cyprus poised to begin their research and we look forward to some of our visiting students and scholars using the equipment in the near future.
As you are all aware, 2018 is CAARI's 40th anniversary year and we are now finalising our summer celebration plans. We hope many of our friends and supporters from over the years will be able to join us. If you think that you can make it to Nicosia for our gala dinner on Thursday the 14th June and to our annual workshop and party on Saturday 16th June then please drop Vathoulla an email (admin@caari.org.cy) and she will reserve places for you. We are also producing a volume entitled CAARI and the Archaeology of Cyprus: the first 40 years as a fundraising souvenir volume. It will be A4 in full colour and feature stories of the excavations, the researchers, and others who have been involved with CAARI over the years, as well as a short history of the Institute. We'll be sharing further information on this when the volume is complete.
Looking forward to seeing many of you in the coming months.
Lindy Crewe, PhD
Director, CAARI
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Students from Lycoming College Pioneer a New Program at CAARI
by Professor Pamela Gaber
January and February of 2018 have been exciting months here at CAARI. We have had our first group of undergraduates here for a Study Abroad semester sponsored by Lycoming College. The program, called "The Afterlife of Artefacts,"is designed to bring students "back stage" in the archaeological process, exposing them to the myriad aspects of sorting, documenting, identifying, inventorying, storing, curating, maintaining, interpreting, and exhibiting that are necessary if the objects unearthed by archaeology are to be informative to scholars and appreciated by the public. Six students are enrolled.
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Professor Gaber sits with, from left to right, students Emily Hepner, Stevanakelly Dolence, Dominic Lyons, Emily Anderson, Karlise Jones, Katelyn Donohue
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The students are spending their first six weeks as interns at the Centre for Visual Arts and Research of the Severis Foundation in Nicosia. They have been immersed in archival work, sorting of collections, and checking accessions. Next week they will mount an exhibition of their own there,focused on the earliest period covered extensively in the Severis Collection: the four-century-long "Latin period" between 1191 and 1571 when Cyprus was governed by western Europeans, and the surviving non-Greek Orthodox communities in Cyprus today. Then, on March 8, they presented their internship experiences at the museum in a series of power point presentations to a public audience at the Centre. They did a wonderful job!
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The group explores Kolossi Castle
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Meanwhile, they have had field trips every week, taking them all around the island. At right, you can see them at Kolossi Castle, an artefact of the Latin period complete with late medieval fortifications and frescoed walls. But in the picture below they are deep in
the antique period, mimicking a classical drama in the ruins of Palaepaphos' famous temple of the "Great Goddess" of Cyprus. They also attended presentations from
Despo Pilides
, Curator of Monuments and Museums, about the history of the Cyprus Museum, and
Alexia Louka
, librarian of the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus (ARU). They've attended public lectures from
William G. Dever
at the ARU, and by Tom Davis (former director and current trustee) at CAARI.
Dr. Lindy Crewe
, CAARI director gave them a lecture about collections at the British Museum and the history-and pitfalls-involved in using them.
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Mimicking classical drama at Palaepaphos: from the left, Stevanakelly Dolence, Emily Hepner, Karlise Jones, Emily Anderson, Katelyn Donohue, Dominic Lyons
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Beginning in the second week in March, the six students begin phase two of their experience. One part of that will be working with material from the Lycoming College excavations at Idalion, including photographing and digitizing, helping to prepare finds for publication. They will also begin a research project focused on the history of collections of Cypriot antiquities in major western museums. By the time they leave in May they will have had an intensive, active, varied experience in Cyprus. Their stay at CAARI has been at the heart of it all. Meeting and interacting with the many scholars who come here has enriched the academic experience in countless ways. And discovering the sounds, sights, and smells of a new environment has been exciting for everyone.
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Thanks to a Remarkable Gift,
CAARI Acquires Cobham's Own Copy of Cobham!
Cobham is among the most widely-known names in Cypriot historiography. "Cobham" was Claude Delaval Cobham, a British colonial official who arrived in Cyprus in 1878 and served as the District Commissioner of Larnaca from 1879 until his retirement in 1908. During his working life and continuing into his retirement Cobham was an indefatigable, pioneering scholar of Cypriot documentary history.
In his historic home, once the Consulate of the English Levant Company in Old Larnaca, he acted as a nexus for scholars interested in Cypriot history and he built an extensive library of works dealing with Cyprus. His library survives to this day at the University of Cambridge (which now houses the Library of the Royal Commonwealth Society which was its original home).
Cobham's publications are among the first modern efforts to systematize the study of the island's history. His most famous book is Excerpta Cypria which assembles and translates documentary accounts of Cyprus by 81 authors
from Strabo in about 23 CE through the last Berat issued by the Sublime Porte to an Archbishop of Cyprus in AH 1282 (1866 CE). To this day, the Excerpta serves as an invaluable source-book for the island's history.
The Excerpta Cypria was originally issued between 1892 and 1895 as supplements to Max Ohnefalsch Richter's The Owl, Science, Literature and Art. In 1895 Cobham edited the supplements together into the first book edition, titled Excerpta Cypria / translated and transcribed by Claude Delaval Cobham. The work was published in Nicosia by Herbert E. Clarke
(Government Printing Office). Additional supplements were published by Clarke over the next several years. In 1908, the now familiar new edition (with the expanded title Excerpta Cypria : materials for a history of Cyprus / translated and transcribed by Claude Delaval Cobham) was published by Cambridge University Press.
In honor of CAARI's 40th birthday, a board member has recently given CAARI a copy of the 1895 first edition of the Excerpta Cypria with Cobham's own bookplate on the inside front cover bound in a leather Zaehnsdorf exhibition binding. This is one of two known copies
of the Excerpta that Cobham held in his library (the other copy with his bookplate is still in his library now held by the University of Cambridge). This copy has no markings or annotations in it and likely Cobham had it bound late in his life as a special project.
The work is scarce - no copies are listed in WorldCat in the United States and no copies are held by libraries in Cyprus. CAARI is pleased to now hold Cobham's own copy of his scarce work and to make it available to scholars.
CAARI continues to make the work of Cobham available to scholars through Digital Cobham, an online bibliography of material about Cyprus published before 1910 collated together from all published and unpublished bibliographies. Digital Cobham is available to all at: caari.org/digitalcobham
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Birthdays are for Giving!
CA
ARI invites all its friends to join in the celebrations by giving a birthday gift. You can do that very simply by clicking the following link, which takes you to our Web site
But there are many ways in which you can make a more personally tailored gift, reflecting the things that are most important to you about CAARI. We offer two ideas here. Further ideas about Cypriot furniture and artefacts, both old and new, will come in the next news-flash.
Gifts of Books
CAARI's library is the very heart of its existence. It is a world-class collection. Help us keep it that way. New titles are just as crucial as old ones.
Katerina, our Librarian, reports on the eager hunger with which new books are greeted-like the books on the right. Katerina says that
Women in Antiq
uity. Real Women Across the Ancient Worl
d gathers brand new essays in order to create an engaging overview of the lives of women in antiquity, and is constantly in use. Gloria London's
Ancient Cookware from th
e Levant
, which investigates cookware and cooking practices in current traditional societies, is also recurrently off the shelf. "A big part of Gloria's work takes
place in Cyprus," she says; "thus the volume offers plenty of new information about
cookware in ancient Cyprus." Readers of the news-flash will remember the write-up on this book a year ago. Dr. London has had two fellowships at CAARI.
Your contribution for books will help CAARI keep up the steady flow of fresh, new publications that are so eagerly welcomed by students and scholars, and so crucial to its library.
To contribute a book:
1) Send us a copy of a book on a Cypriot subject that you've written, or loved reading; or
2) Send a check marked for books to CAARI at 665 Beacon Street, Suite 200, Boston. MA 02115; or
3)
Look for CAARI's Wishlist on
www.Amazon.com (use "Find a List or Registry", search for CAARI, and click on the CAARI bird), choose a book,
and send it to CAARI, 11 Andreas Demetriou Street, Nicosia 1505.
Below is just one, colorful sample of the books that Katerina has displayed on Amazon, all enticing, and all earnestly desired by CAARI's library.
A Gift of Preservation
Among the features that make CAARI so special are the many traditional artefacts that contribute to its décor and distinctly
Cypriot atmosphere. Many of these are specific to Cyprus. Most were originally quotidian objects, worn with use and beautiful in their functional honesty, but they have become extremely rare and thus very precious. Among them is CAARI's unique collection of 18th-century laces featured in the last fall's news-flash. Also among them is this group of three traditional sieves. Such sieves were used in village homes into the early 20th century for sifting food. As you can see in the image on the right, they are finely calibrated tools with densely punctured surfaces. But time has left them fractured and fragile. Lindy Crewe has consulted with a conservator, who is eager to do the specialized work needed to preserve them. It will cost about €300. CAARI's draconian budget has no line item for such work, but Lindy Crewe believes that preserving such traditional
pieces is an obligation that we in the archaeological community have to the culture and customs that we study. Helping CAARI with all or part of the sieves' preservation would be a gift, indeed, to CAARI itself and its mission in Cyprus.
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The Latest on CAARI's Birthday Celebration
The week of 10 - 17 June 2018 will see a glittering constellation of birthday festivities in Nicosia:
A
gala dinner on June 14 in which CAARI will honor Trustee Chris Christodoulou
(€50 per person),
A
party at CAARI
for everyone on June 16, following the
Summer Archaeological Workshop
A
reception at the U.S. Embassy (by invitation)
And our forthcoming birthday book, CAARI and the Archaeology of Cyprus: The First 40 Years.
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Help Make 2018 a Wonderful CAARI Year
CAARI has looked ahead with eager anticipation to its 40th anniversary. The joyously awaited year of 2018 took on a darker tone with the possibility that Washington would eliminate the source of much of CAARI's funding. Could our funding fail? But CAARI is mature now-it's 40 years old and committed to its own, self-confident survival. Help us make 2018 a year not of threat, but of robust self-assurance:
Over the past 40 years, CAARI has been blessed with so many generous friends. It is thanks to you that these decades have been so fruitful. We owe you such deep thanks. Know that your gifts are being used fully and thoughtfully to sustain ever deeper understanding of the immensely rich cultural nexus that is Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean. We are committed to continuing this work! Thank you for being committed, too.
With thanks to all,
Annemarie Carr
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