Bleda Düring CAARI lecture

(Re)Connecting Cyprus: Exchange Networks
and Society in the
Third Millennium BCE
The manner and timing of how Cyprus became connected to the broader eastern Mediterranean in the third millennium BCE has been much debated, with widely different perspectives on what happened and what role people already present on the island had in these events. In this talk I will take a step back from this debate and ask what the available data can tell us about changes in connectivity in Cypriot prehistory, and approach the question from both an outsider and Anatolian perspective. I will argue that such a perspective can shift how we understand connectivities between Cyprus and the surrounding regions and foreground how specific things and practices were selected and appropriated on Cyprus across the Chalcolithic-Philia divide.