Bulletin

Issue: August/September 2006

Research in Action

Modern tales of an ancient village

Once upon a time - around 2,400 BC - a few dozen people set up the small village of Marki on the island of Cyprus.

Excavations in progress.

They survived on their cereal crops and livestock - harvesting wheat and barley, raising sheep, cattle, donkeys, goats and pigs, and hunting deer - and engaged in mining and processing local copper.

With an average life-span of thirty to forty years, most village women died before their first grandchild was born.

Yet these early Bronze Age people lived in congenial style, in well-constructed houses of stone and mudbrick, within large communal courtyards - the social centerpiece of village life, where families congregated en famille or with other families from neighbouring houses.

There were relationships of kinship and friendship between the villagers of Marki and neighbouring settlements, but over the next few hundred years, as their population expanded, the villagers’ lives became increasingly complex.

Where once several families baked bread in a common courtyard, individual families now retreated to their own hearths. They stored their grain in jars and bins inside their houses, instead of communal storage facilities, and many villagers began making their own pottery in preference to bringing it in from larger centres nearby.

Relationships became more formal, households exhibited increasingly more need for privacy, and the sharing of resources within and between households diminished.

Gradually the village itself changed shape. Originally a small and close-knit community of several households linked by open courtyards, Marki soon acquired the accoutrements of greater sophistication. Rectilinear, more individualised architecture and walled courtyards with doorways ensured greater household privacy, while an increasingly dense network of village streets and laneways controlled access between the houses.

By about 2000 BC the centre of the village had shifted. An egalitarian, community-oriented way of life had succumbed to village hierarchies and newly-evolved concepts of property ownership, wealth, and inter-generational inheritance: reflected particularly in the two biggest compounds, which appear to have survived intact across ten generations. By the middle of the Bronze Age, this thriving village had been deserted - no longer able to sustain itself, or perhaps caught up in a wider migration towards bigger regional centres. We know these things about Marki because La Trobe archaeologists Drs David Frankel and Jenny Webb and 150 student volunteers have spent ten winters interrogating the archaeological clues the villagers left behind - the pottery sherds, human and animal bones, broken jewellery, chunks of village walls, and other detritus of their daily lives over 500 years and 20 generations of occupation.

We know the social and economic status of the householders, the size of their households, the structural, social and economic relationship of each household to the next, and even quite intimate details about relationships within households - across five centuries.

If there’s a voyeuristic element to such intense domestic focus, that’s quintessentially the Frankel-Webb style: Dr Frankel calls it ‘household archaeology’, and Dr Webb describes it as ‘putting people back into the landscape’.

It translates to a forensic examination of domestic tools, technologies and practices in order to understand the relationships and behavioural patterns behind them - including the mechanisms for transferring cultural knowledge and skills from one generation to the next.

The result is an intimate profile of village life in the early Bronze Age - revealing not only how life was lived in this village, but new insights into a much wider slice of ancient history.

According to the archaeologists, Marki was one of a small but tightly integrated set of villages on Cyprus historically identified by their ‘Philia’ culture - a distinct, short-lived cultural system that emerged during the transition from the Late Chalcolithic era to the Early Bronze Age.

Marki is the only site providing Philia artefacts from both settlement and burials, affording a unique opportunity for archeologists to look beyond the objects to the tightly networked cultural system that produced them.

What they found informs the final chapters of their 15-year AR C-funded study of the Early and Middle Bronze Age on Cyprus - now consolidated in the massive second volume of their groundbreaking study - the 750-page Marki Alonia: An Early and Middle Bronze Age Settlement in Cyprus; Excavations 1995-2000 published in ‘Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology’ by Paul Åströms Förlag, Sävedalen, Sweden, 2006. The volume includes a DVD which contains all the primary documentation and an extensive visual archive of the site and artifacts.

In the first part of the project (published as ‘Marki 1’ in 1996, after three excavation seasons), Frankel and Webb argued that Anatolian migrants rather than any internal events introduced metallurgy and other Bronze Age customs and technologies to Cyprus.

They have reinforced that argument in ‘Marki 2’ with new evidence from the suite of behaviourally-based research methodologies developed in situ over five further excavations, between 1995 and 2000. As in all good stories, however, the Marki narrative has many threads, and running through both volumes of the Marki tale is another original version of Cypriot pre-history: one side of a compelling story of the coming together of ancient cultures.

The interaction between them was not what recent history has taught us to expect.

Measured against more recent colonizations, the arrival of Anatolian peoples in Cyprus at the beginning of the Bronze Age might easily be seen as an invitation to conflict. Yet - on the evidence from Marki and other sites - these settler and indigenous groups lived side by side, pursuing two different ways of life. ‘Within 100 to 200 years, there was no trace of the Chalcolithic way of life. Everybody on the island was archaeologically Bronze Age,’ Dr Frankel says.

Marki 1 and 2 constitute an in-depth study of one of those groups - a Bronze Age settler community - at the onset of the Bronze Age. The authors have already embarked on their next big story: what it was like on the other side. That project - involving the excavation of a Chalcolithic settlement in the same region - will begin in earnest in 2007.

A fundamental contribution

A site report such as Marki Alonia is a fundamentally important outcome of archaeological excavation. This book makes contributions in three ways. As a primary document presenting evidence it will be used as a source for generations of archaeologists in the future. As a contribution to archaeological methodology, it introduces new approaches to analysis and explanation.

The broader interpretations change and significantly enhance our understanding of the past.