Blog #94: Reconstructing Space, Place, and Power in Late Bronze Age Cyprus with Kevin Fisher

Peopling the Past brings occasional interviews with researchers on their recently published works. In this week’s blog we interview Dr. Kevin Fisher of UBC on his recently published monograph, “Monumentality, Place-making and Social Interaction on Late Bronze Age Cyprus”, exploring the complex ways in which urban environments and monumental space shape human societies.

Congratulations on such a monumental book! First of all, what drew you to study monumentality, “place-making”, and social power?

Thanks!  I’ve been interested in architecture since I was kid–probably something to do with Lego.  I was also interested in archaeology, but wasn’t really sure at the time about how to make a career out of it, so I decided to go into architecture school after I finished high school.  For various reasons, including an aversion to math, I left after a few months and decided to pursue archaeology instead and found myself at Brock University, the “local” university in Niagara, Ontario where I grew up. I hadn’t planned on staying beyond that year, but ended up really liking it there and eventually completed my BA in Classics.  

While at Brock I took courses in both sociology and human geography that focused on people’s relationships with the built environment.  There I was introduced to Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City and Amos Rapoport’s The Meaning of the Built Environment, which were hugely influential in my later research.  At the same time, in my archaeology courses at Brock, David Rupp, who used anthropological approaches in his work on Iron Age Cyprus, emphasized the importance of sociopolitical dynamics and particularly power relations in understanding ancient societies. 

During my PhD in Anthropology at University of Toronto, my supervisor, Ted Banning, introduced me to Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson’s work on space syntax (especially their book The Social Logic of Space), which provided a way of analyzing social relations from building plans and seemed well-suited to archaeological case studies.  So, I credit these early influences in helping shape my interests in both architecture and archaeology. They all came together in my dissertation, which laid the groundwork for the current book.

Why is Late Bronze Age Cyprus such an apt case study for understanding these social processes? Is it a unique case or is it more a representative case of what’s going on in the wider eastern Mediterranean region?

The ancient Cypriots often seem to “go their own way”, as far back as the Neolithic (beginning ca. 9000 BCE) when the island was first “colonized” by fisher-foragers from the mainland.  In scholarship of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this was often characterized as the “backwardness” and conservatism typically attributed to islands and their people.  Seen instead through the lens of connectivity (see, for example, the work of Cyprian Broodbank, Bernard Knapp, and others), I think its insularity afforded the Cypriots opportunities for maritime interconnections but also the ability to limit those interconnections and their impacts when it suited them and pick and choose the innovations or influences they adopted or adapted.  I couldn’t say if it’s unique in a global sense, but it certainly takes a different trajectory from its better-known eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern neighbours in terms of the development of many of the traditional hallmarks of a “complex” society. 

In broad terms, we see the emergence of complex sociopolitical organization (which we might characterize as early states) and urbanism in regions like Mesopotamia and Egypt before the end of the 4th millennium BCE, and in the Levant and Anatolia during the 3rd millennium.  While there are signs of more complex sociopolitical  organization and international connections on Cyprus’s north coast during the Early through Middle Bronze Age (late 3rd to early 2nd millennium BCE), the evidence is largely limited to cemeteries.  The lack of archaeological field work in northern Cyprus since 1974 hasn’t helped our understanding of this situation, but whatever was happening, it does not appear to be associated with urbanism.  Things change rather dramatically in the transition to the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1700-1100 BCE) where we see growing evidence for social differentiation and more complex economic organization, along with the emergence of the island’s first cities, new types of houses and tombs, and the first large-scale monumental buildings.  The rather “late” and rapid appearance of these phenomena seemed like a case worthy of further investigation.

You state in your introduction, “I investigate how new built environments. . . materialized new patterns of social interaction and organization that fundamentally changed the way most Cypriots lived their lives.” (p. 7) The assumption usually goes the other way, namely that changing social norms and hierarchies changed the built environment. What elements of the archaeological landscape on Cyprus, or what other examples and theories, made you think differently about the role of the built environment in reforming society?

Yes, typically the changes to the built environment that I mentioned above have been seen as mere indicators of social transformation and the seemingly natural result of socioeconomic and demographic processes, rather than as one of the drivers of that transformation.  I don’t think this is unique to Cyprus, but rather the general way in which ancient built environments have been perceived until fairly recently.  I was influenced by exposure to social theories that attempted to link human action and interaction within built environments to social structure and change.  

Bourdieu’s famous analysis of the traditional Kabyle house was influential in illustrating how daily practice in a built environment–the movements through a building’s rooms and around its features–shapes social reproduction, while Foucault’s Discipline and Punish highlighted how power relations are materialized in built environments, particularly in creating relationships of visibility and invisibility. Giddens’s theory structuration was important in illustrating the recursive relationship between human action or agency and the formation and reproduction of social structures.  Space syntax analysis provided a way to bridge these “high-level theories” (as Michael Smith calls them) and the material remains of buildings on the ground.  I felt, however, that its focus on the configuration of space as the key social determinant was limiting and this led me to bring into play ideas about the material agency of the built environment and the properties and meanings of the materials of which buildings are made.  What did it mean, for example, to make a wall out of sandstone ashlar (cut-stone) masonry rather than mudbrick?

You state that, for Late Bronze Age buildings on Cyprus, “the threads of place, identity and memory are so intertwined as to be nearly impossible to consider as discrete phenomena.” (293) This is a fascinating chapter (Chapter 8), that interweaves the chaîne opératoire of building materials and styles with the actual activities and sensory experiences that occurred within them. Can you briefly discuss one of your case studies and how real people on Cyprus would have experienced this built environment?

Let’s consider Building X at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, excavated by Alison South.  This impressive, court-centred structure was quite likely the administrative centre of the city, if not the entire valley.  The experience of the building would have varied considerably depending on one’s social status.  I tried in the book to give some sense of this experience, beginning with its construction using mudbrick, wood, plaster and stone–a process that would’ve directly or indirectly involved the participation of many people within and beyond the city.  I suggested, for example, that we should envision vast areas along the west bank of the Vasilikos River given over to the making and drying of mudbricks, and a nearly continuous procession of finished bricks from the riverside to the building site.

I also consider the sensory properties of the building’s finished sandstone ashlar foundations, quarried several km away, with their visible tool marks and lifting bosses purposefully left to materialize the process of their creation, while facilitating the interplay of light and shadow depending on the time of day.  Ashlar blocks also lined the interior of the central court and there were likely two large ashlar columns supporting a balcony or balconies, with beams that recent analysis suggest could have been made of cedar, renowned in the ancient Near East as a high-quality, durable and aromatic wood.  The court’s floor was a pebbled surface, which would have felt and sounded different from the plaster floors of adjoining spaces.

The materiality of rooms such as Building X’s central court made them symbolically-charged spaces, particularly well-suited to hosting formal interactions through which social roles, statuses and identities could be negotiated and displayed.  The performance of rituals, including ceremonial feasting was a key part of these social occasions.  Evidence of just such an event, likely held in the central court, comes from a stone-lined pit (likely a latrine) in a nearby room.  There, South recovered a deposit with at least 85 vessels for eating and drinking, including a number of local finewares and many imported Mycenaean wares, along with numerous animal bones (mostly meat-bearing joints of goats) and plant remains.

In the book I discuss such social occasions as powerful sensorial performances during which people and things were brought into focused interplay.  These things included not only the built environment itself, but also the ceramic assemblage (usually an imported Mycenaean pictorial krater for mixing wine and local fineware cups for serving and drinking), and items of personal adornment, some laden with iconography (finger rings and earrings, pectorals, cylinder seals, etc.) that signaled one’s personal identity, gender and social standing within the local group and wider communities.  Such things combined with the smells and tastes of food and drink (and the psycho-social effects of the latter) to create memorable experiences.

These events varied in size and exclusivity; in some cases highlighting social differences, in other instances downplaying differences to forge a wider sense of community.  Often both aspects were at play during the same occasion. It was through the performance of such memorable experiences that monumental spaces became places and I argue in the book that such occasions became the primary arena through which Late Bronze Age social dynamics were enacted.

You start your book off with the intimidating topic of the architecture of formidable groups like the Nazis and the Neo-Assyrians, which is very effective for evoking the social messaging and power encoded not just into architecture but into the configuration of space. What buildings in the modern world have you encountered that are equally powerful in this type of messaging? How can they be used as teaching tools to make us think about the power of space and monumentality?

In the book I also discuss some of the corporate headquarters of contemporary tech giants like Apple and Facebook/Meta.  Apple’s much-hyped headquarters, which opened in April 2017 in Cupertino, California nicely encapsulates some of the same aspects of monumentality, messaging, materiality and power.  Designed by A-list architect Norman Foster, the centerpiece of Apple Park is a monumental ring-shaped “groundscraper”.  It’s a staggering 461 m in diameter and 7 stories in height, 4 of which are above ground, and was designed to accommodate some 12,000 employees.  The structure’s signature feature is its extensive use of massive, seamless glass panels, some of which on the building’s exterior are 15 m tall.

Described as a statement of openness and free movement, the design is intended to facilitate collaboration while materializing the company’s penchant for design innovation and aesthetic sensibility, and its status as the world’s most valuable brand. Indeed, it would be the last Apple design project that Steve Jobs would oversee before his death in 2011.  In one of his final interviews, Jobs told a biographer that he wanted “to leave a signature campus that expresses the values of the company for generations.”

The attention to detail seen in Apple products extended to careful—some might say fanatical—control over the building’s construction and materials. All interior wood used for furniture was harvested from a certain species of maple and subject to some 30 pages of guidelines.  The doorhandle design took over a year-and-a-half of negotiation. 

While the building is unquestionably impressive and widely acknowledged as a technological tour de force and design icon, others have experienced it differently.  Some have emphasized its contribution to suburban sprawl, seen it as out of step with the future of work, or critiqued its role in perpetuating the “tech bro” phenomenon with its 100,000 sq ft. “wellness centre” but complete lack of day care facilities. The signature invisible glass walls and doors—doors that were not allowed to have any kind of visible threshold—had negative effects on employee’s experience of working in the building.  It was not long before some reported (under condition of anonymity) cases of co-workers being injured after walking into glass walls and their use of Post-It notes to indicate the locations of glass doors—which the employees were subsequently told by management to remove because they detracted from the building’s aesthetic.  There’s a joke about corporate transparency in there somewhere!

I think Apple’s groundscraper makes a compelling illustration of the continued relevance of interrogating the relationships between people and their built environments and the power dynamics embedded in those relationships. In addition to emphasizing the role of materials and materiality in making something monumental, it also raises the issue of how the meanings of monumental structures are subject to competing interpretations and how those meanings might change and be re-interpreted over a building’s use life.

Where does this work lead you next, in terms of future research trajectories, either on Cyprus or concerning space and monumentality?

I would also like to write a monograph on approaches to past built environments in global perspective, based in part on the “Archaeologies of Space and Place” seminar I teach occasionally at UBC.  I’m finding myself increasingly interested in monumentality across space and time and am thinking about writing a book for a general audience on this subject that bridges ancient and contemporary periods.  While wandering around Chicago last November, I was struck by the pervasive use of Neoclassical architecture and art in monumental construction in the city after the 1871 fire and its translation into Art Deco, which also brought ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern symbolism into play.  I think there’s a project in there somewhere, perhaps comparing such uses in the US and Canada or in North America and Europe.  There are clearly a number of directions this work could take!