Project

A Time Capsule of the Crisis Period.Cyprus and the Levant at the End of the Late Bronze Age – The Pyla-Kokkinokremos Record.

Code
3G010218
Duration
01 January 2018 → 31 December 2021
Funding
Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)
Research disciplines
No data available
Keywords
Late Bronze Age
 
Project description

Textual and archaeological evidence accord in featuring a scenario of crisis in the Eastern

Mediterranean around 1200 BC –Aegean, Cypriot, Anatolian and Levantine centres were devastated

and Egypt was attacked by the so-called Sea Peoples –but it was also a period of transformation,

innovation and settlement continuity.

As the discussion on the Late Bronze Age crisis and the associated complex web of migration,

interconnection and influence between different populations has in certain aspects developed into

circular reasoning, the premises are in need of evidence. Therefore, the ‘risis research’can

certainly gain from unobstructed new archaeological data. For this bottom up approach the

archaeological research at the site of Pyla-Kokkinokremos in Cyprus surfaces as an exceptional

opportunity, owing to its founding at the end of the 13th century BC –a time when the crisis

reached its zenith – its very short-lived occupation and its seemingly planned abandonment leaving

all material in situ.

While the settlement was inhabited for what appears to be less than fifty years, the site becomes a

very valuable ‘ime capsule’of this critical phase.

The archaeological research at Pyla-Kokkinokremos in correlation with results from other sites has

great potential in becoming a crucial factor in the unravelling process of the breakup of the Late

Bronze Age world and of the character of cultural interaction among the peoples of the Eastern

Mediterranean during this period.