Professor Cyprian Broodbank

Before Aphrodite: The Minoans of Kythera Revisited

Event details

Date: Monday 30 March 2015, 5.30pm - 6.30pm

Venue: the Meadows Lecture Theatre, William Robertson Wing, Old Medical School, Teviot Place, Edinburgh

Biography

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Cyprian Broodbank grew up in London, and read History at Oxford. After a Masters at Bristol, he took his PhD at Cambridge, and from 1994 until 2014 was based at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, where he rose to the title of Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology.

From October 2014 he moved to Cambridge University as John Disney professor of Archaeology and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

His first book, An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades (2000) won the Runciman Award and the James R. Wiseman Prize of the Archaeological Institute of America. His second book The Making of the Middle Sea (2013) won last year's Wolfson History Prize.

His current research embraces Mediterranean archaeology and history, comparative island archaeology, and archaeology as deep global history. He also co-directs a large-scale landscape archaeology project on the Greek island of Kythera.

Lecture abstract

Islands make superb contexts in which to analyse over the long-term the shifting webs of connections that tie our world together, and few more so than those of the early Mediterranean.

The island of Kythera, situated between Crete and the Peloponnese, occupies a particularly significant place as a stepping stone or filter in maritime routes of communication, trade and movement. Since Classical times, the island has been renowned for its association with the cult of Aphrodite. Since the 1960s it has been almost equally famous for the early date and intensity of its relations with the emergent palatial communities of Bronze Age Minoan Crete, to its south.

Since 1998, the Kythera Island Project, co-directed by Professor Broodbanks and Dr Evangelia Kiriatzi of the Fitch Laboratory (British School at Athens), has explored through archaeological fieldwork and associated research the dynamics of 'minoanisation' across the island's landscapes. It has accomplished this within a deeper historical framework, stretching from the earliest landfalls on the island, onward to the island's entanglement in the empires of Classical Athens, Rome, Byzantium, Venice and the United Kingdom, and through to the diaspora communities of the present day.

The Cretan engagement with Kythera is revealed as a complex, changing set of relationships involving trade, mobility, cultural affiliation, technological innovation, ritual practice and at certain periods the probable exercise of political power.