October 10, 2018 - Catch up on the latest news from CAARI!


Dear : 
CAARI's doors, so familiar to many of you, stand open to a new semester's tide of students and scholars. Join them! Our news-flash summons all academic readers to check out the fellowships page on the CAARI Web site. It's time to make applications:

 
You'll find information and application forms for:
  • CAARI's own three graduate student stipends offer support for travel to Cyprus.

  • Two CAARI/CAORC postdoctoral fellowships that fund a month's summer research in Cyprus.

  • Soon the brand new postdoctoral fellowship in honour of Professor Eddie Peltenburg, that can support a full academic year's research time on Cyprus will be available.

  • Other relevant fellowship opportunities, too, are listed on the Fellowships page. 
Browse the possibilities, and apply!
 
Following the Message from the Director, you can read reports from this past summer's fellows. They'll give you vivid glimpses of what such fellowships can yield. CAARI has seen exciting research over the summer.


Message From the Director

Dear friends and supporters of CAARI,
 
I hope that our northern hemisphere friends have had a wonderful summer break and that those in southern regions are looking forward to spring! I've spent my summer in Cyprus, first excavating at Kissonerga-Skalia in July and researching in the library in Nicosia during August. As ever, August in Nicosia was sweltering and quiet but this gave us time to catch up and formulate plans for the coming year.

Looking ahead, our autumn programme is finalised, with three exciting lectures arranged. The first of these is on the 27th September, when Dr Nicholas Stanley-Price will present his research on ' The other Cesnola: the arrest and trial of Alessandro Palma di Cesnola for illicit excavation'. As an additional event for CAARI's 40th birthday celebrations, Dr Stanley-Price has kindly given us permission to film the lecture. So keep an eye out for a link on our website to this fascinating talk. You can find dates and titles of the additional autumn lectures on our website and Facebook pages.

CAARI has a new U.S. office, with new address, and our own email suffix. Together with ASOR, we have moved from Boston University to offices at the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia , close to Washington D.C.


Address:
CAARI
3682 King Street
P.O. Box 16072
Alexandria, VA  22302-9998

Telephone:
703-461-1762



For those of you who will be in the Washington DC area on November 12, I'll be giving a lecture in the AIA Washington DC Society lecture series entitled Brewing Beer in the Bronze Age: Social Transformations and Feasts at Kissonerga-Skalia on Cyprus. I'll be presenting the latest finds from recent seasons and talking about how Bronze Age people may have used feasts to reinforce alliances or create social inequalities. I'd love to meet as many CAARI friends as possible so please do come along and introduce yourselves.  The lecture will take place at 6:30 PM at George Washington University, the Elliott School, 1957 E Street NW, Room 213.

CAARI's 40th celebrations are not over yet and we'll be continuing with another event during the ASOR meeting in Denver, jointly hosted with our friends at ACOR who turn 50 this year. We still have work to do to get the lab up and running, to arrange our ecofact collections in an accessible manner and to catalogue and sort our map and new book collections. Excellent progress with our map collection has already been made thanks to the efforts of Kellie Youngs, The Anita Cecil O'Donovan Fellow, during her stay and now we are also grateful to Dr Brianna Bricker who is giving CAARI her time over the autumn to create the map catalogue.

So, much to do but the goodwill generated around our 40th celebrations makes it seem a lighter task!

Lindy Crewe, PhD
Director, CAARI

Research Reports: The 2018 Graduate Student Fellows


The Danielle Parks Memorial Fellowship
Sa rah Douglas, University of Manchester
Gender and Status on Prehistoric Cyprus: Rethinking Bronze Age Burial Data (c. 2500-1340 BC)
 
The Danielle Parks Fellowship offered me the opportunity to travel to Cyprus and carry out a final research trip in the later stages of completing my doctoral thesis. This allowed me to spend time surrounded  by the library's extensive collection of  Bronze Age resources and was especially helpful during the initial stages of writing up my Ph.D. My research is focused on the active entanglement of gender and status within Bronze Age burials on the island and one of the methodological strands employed within my thesis is the analysis of tools and weapons from tombs for evidence of use- wear. Staying in close proximity to The Cyprus Museum in Nicosia, I was able to access a number of key assemblages and further expand my data set. This reinforced the results of my analysis of other assemblages and has supported evidence for worn and used tools and weapons in the Bronze Age burial record. CAARI has become a second home on Cyprus over the years, and especially over the last three. I am very grateful to all at CAARI and the Danielle Parks Memorial Fellowship and I look forward to returning soon!


The Anita Cecil O'Donovan Fellowship
Kellie Youngs, University of Melbourne
The Transmission and Innovation of Faience and Glass Technologies of Cyprus in the Late Bronze Age
 
My research time in Cyprus enabled me to add a number of objects to my catalogue of Late Bronze Age Cypriot glass and faience objects.  Using a  portable scanner/camera with an automated turntable, I have created a database of 3D images of Late Cypriot glass and faience objects held in international collections to provide a platform for precise, simultaneous comparative 3D morphometric analysis to identify distinguishing manufacturing signatures across the collections. Distinguishing manufacturing signatures will provide insight into what level of local production existed and how it was influenced by imported products and technological transfer. By closely examining and scanning objects in the Cyprus and Larnaka museums a clarified typology is now developing. Many similar object types are described in radically differently ways by the various archaeologists who excavated them at different sites over time. Consequently, it was very difficult for me to make connections between these objects until I examined them in person during this visit.

I benefited greatly from my stay at CAARI, where I was provided with secure and collegial accommodation, opportunities to network with other scholars, and access to the comprehensive research library to search for volumes unavailable in Australia. They enhanced my research experience exponentially. Making professional connections with scholars at CAARI amplified my understanding of research, leading to new avenues of investigation in my PhD project and links for future collaborative research projects. I feel privileged and give thanks for this support.


The Helena Wylde Swiny and Stuart Swiny Fellowship

Ian Randall, Brown University
Dining and Connectivity at times of Crisis on the South Coast of Cyprus
 
My fellowship work at CAARI this summer proved to be incredibly fruitful, not least because of the resources available at the institute itself.  I am studying ceramic  production on Cyprus in the the wake of catastrophe-both following the late 4th century C.E. earthquake, and after the Arab raids of the 7th century C.E.  CAARI provided both the people and the resources necessary to significantly advance my project. For starters I was able to make use of Demos Christou's 2013 volume on the excavations at the coastal basilica at Kourion, an essential work that is extremely difficult to access in the United States. Equally valuable was the presence of Laura Swantek, co-director of the Kourion Urban Space Project, and CAARI/CAORC fellow for 2018.  She allowed me to discuss at length with her the nature of the contextual situation of the ceramic corpus excavated over the last several years. She also gave me access to the data I will need to make sense of the material itself when I examine it in the storerooms of the Department of Antiquities next year. Add to this the other volumes available in the truly remarkable library of the institute, the comparative ceramic collection, and the status of CAARI (which opens more than a few doors in Cyprus), and you can see how indebted I am to the staff and board of trustees of CAARI for the opportunities provided by the Helena Wylde Swiny and Stuart Swiny Fellowship.


Research Reports

CAARI/CAORC Fellow Dr. Laura Swantek
Arizona State University
 
Social Complexity on Cyprus before and after Urbanism

This summer, as the recipient of a CAARI/ CAORC fellowship, I had the pleasure to work and live at CAARI for a month. As my work is about interactions and connections between people, CAARI afforded me the opportunity to not only research this subject through archaeological materials, but also live this experience through the many people who pass through the library doors. The interactions with data and the new connections built with other researchers have enhanced my work, giving me new ideas and avenues to explore.

Dr. Swantek on site at Amathus
My work at CAARI focused on building the foundations of a project centred on understanding the emergence of complex social networks and social and economic inequality in the Late Bronze Age. This is an extension of my previous work that explored similar processes in the Prehistoric Bronze Age, and my first research foray into urban society on Cyprus.  As the project progresses, we will be able to see how social networks change over time, specifically across the urbanism divide, as well as quantify inequality and measure its effects on individuals and groups.  The first step in this new research is locating the data and building a bibliography.  As I use published data from mortuary contexts, having extended access to the CAARI library was invaluable.  As the stacks of books on my desk grew, so did the bibliography and site database for this project.  These volumes and the data they contain are not readily available at my home institution; the many hours spent with them this summer in the library ensured that this project will continue. 

Dr. Swantek in the library

My time at CAARI this summer also offered me the opportunity to start a blog about my work, and how my interactions with others in my growing social network shape my thinking ( https://drswantekoncyprus.wordpress.com). Through these interactions, I started thinking and writing about my new-found interest in Late Bronze Age pottery, and revisited some ideas about mobility and gender, heterarchies and how people take on multiple functions within their social networks, and cross-scale interactions or how local interactions can have greater global effects.  I even took on a debate about processual vs post-processual archaeology, and why we should not consider social complexity a linear process, because in doing so, we actually degrade our understanding of the past.  I plan to continue this blog and distribute it to archaeologists, and more importantly, to non-archaeologists as a means of educating the public about the importance of social science and learning about the past for our changing world.
 
Without my stay at CAARI this summer, my interactions with people and data, and the ideas they produced would not have been possible.  I am extremely grateful for this opportunity and the time I was given to develop my thoughts and work. 

Dr. Henry Shapiro of Princeton University, the other 2018 CAARI/CAORC Fellow, is on Cyprus now, studying Armenian Pilgrims in Ottoman Cyprus. His report will come in the winter.

Help Us Keep Supporting Great Research! 

Every one of these reports is a resounding "thank you!" to CAARI's friends . They show how very much your gifts to CAARI mean-to real people, and to real research.  Your gifts are turned right into indelible experiences and unforgettable insights.  They can never be taken away.  The human story is richer for them.  CAARI needs all the help you can give it to keep these research opportunities coming. Please help us keep our fellowships strong and bright! 

There will be a special  opportunity to support CAARI's laboratory and research resources on

#GIVING TUESDAY, November 27

We'll send a reminder about that.  And of course you can always contribute to:


With all our sincere thanks for your enthusiasm and support!

Annemarie Weyl Carr
CAARI VP

Annemarie Weyl Carr
Vice President, CAARI Board
www.caari.org