Cooking pottery as indicator of resilience and change in Early Medieval Cyprus. An archaeometric approach

Abstract

The early medieval times in Cyprus are signified, conventionally, by the Arab invasions of the mid-seventh century (649/650CE). Past research viewed those events as the catalyst which led to a transformation from a prosperous province to a marginal territory balancing between two antagonising empires. Recently, studies have shifted their focus on reassessing this period’s scant -yet present- material culture. In pottery studies, despite the advances in typological and distribution aspects, few have explored technological issues of early medieval ceramic production through instrumental analysis. This study focuses on the compositional and technological characterisation of cooking vessels through ceramic petrography (TL-OM), found in relevant contexts in Cyprus, representing both wheel-thrown and handmade traditions. Sherds coming from five major early-medieval sites of the island (sites of Kophinou, Kalavasos-Kopetra, Akrotiri, Yeroskipou-Ayioi Pente and Dhiorios), outlined a picture of two parallel trends transversing across sites, i.e., an inter-regional shared sense of shape uniformity smoothening the local variances and a strong regionalism in terms of raw material procurement. Wheel-thrown cookware -found in every site and strongly represented by the Dhiorios workshop- showed the survival of Late Antique shapes well into the Early Middle Ages, in fabrics related mainly to the broader area of Dhiorios. In addition, handmade vessels of a "shared repertoire" showed a variety of local clays for their manufacture. When integrated into their archaeological context in Cyprus, the results support the idea of a ceramic koine persisting through the beginning of the Byzantine Early Middle Ages on an intra and inter-regional level.