The Archaeology Of Place In Ancient Cyprus

Available

 * http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/project.php?id=1091

Lead researcher

 * Stuart Dunn

Description
This project builds on the A. G. Leventis-funded Heritage Gazetteer of Cyprus project. Whereas the latter is concerned with place-names and how their spelling and language change and evolve over time, The Archaeology of Place in Ancient Cyprus is concerned with mapping sites whose contemporary names cannot be known, and whose spatial configuration is often uncertain; or at least only partially evident. We are creating a seed dataset which seeks to represent Cypriot archaeology of the prehistoric period, before any contemporary place-names are documented. This involves a multistage process of critical quantification: starting with published material on prehistoric sites and features, we are examining how these can be defined in objective (and computable) terms, and how different units of archaeology can be represented at different scales. This will lead to a broader examination the 'toponymic spaces' of prehistoric features: how do the areas they occupy on the Earth's surface relate to more recent place-name structures? And what strategies can we use to grow this dataset in the future, beyond the corpus of material currently available in print?