Abstract

In June 2021 the members of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic Cyprus Project (NCCP) organised a conference on Cypriot archaeology, which was the first international meeting under the auspices of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, focusing specifically on early Cypriot prehistory.
The main subject of this conference was ‘everyday life’, and the ‘everyday’ and its profound implications for individuals and groups are also among the main issues examined in this volume, which was partly inspired by the conference and by the discussions that were fuelled at that time. Nevertheless, the broader term ‘lifeways’ was adopted here, so as to leave enough space for diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. The study of quotidian life through the analysis of its material and immaterial components forms a key issue for anyone who wishes to approach early Cypriot communities and their way of life since the earliest appearance of human groups on the island. Archaeology plays a rather crucial role in these attempts; it extracts ‘meaning’ from the recovered materialities, the organisation of space and the broader landscape surrounding areas of human action; it provides comprehensive views of various daily indoor/ outdoor practices and socialities that largely shape identities, social perspectives and experiences; and it locates habitual activities and performances echoing social reproduction and enculturation processes or even acts of resistance to the social norms and/or change. Ultimately, by highlighting the ‘ordinary’ or what are sometimes perceived as ‘mundane’ activities it becomes possible to reconstruct the ways people understand and reproduce both their ‘selves’ and their world. The latter allows fruitful insights into individual/group behaviours and structured lifeways.
The selected time frame of this volume covers a rather long period from the local Epipalaeolithic (or ‘Akrotiri phase’, i.e. ca 11,000–9000 BC) through the end of the Middle Bronze Age, traditionally dated at around 1650/1600 BC, just before the major socioeconomic restructuring of the early Late Bronze Age and the subsequent appearance of urban centres in Cyprus.