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

2018-01-01 – 2021-12-31

Abstract

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.