About the course
This course is led by UBC faculty member Kevin Fisher.
This archaeological field school will take place in Kalavasos and the surrounding area, Larnaka District, Republic of Cyprus.
The main objective of this course is to train you in the principles and methods of field archaeology as practiced in the Mediterranean and Near East today so that you can work as a skilled field archaeologist on other projects. A secondary, but still important, the objective is for students to gain an understanding of Cypriot material culture and how it is used to illuminate past behaviour and the rise and development of civilization on the island. By living in a small Greek-Cypriot village, you will also gain an appreciation of both modern and traditional aspects of Cypriot culture and social life.
Students will work as members of the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments (KAMBE) Project, which is investigating the relationship between urban landscapes, social interaction, and social change on the island of Cyprus during the Late Bronze Age (c. 1650–1100 BCE). They will be involved in two main components of the project, focused on the urban centre of Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios:
- excavations in the Northeast Area of the site, including the newly-discovered monumental Building XVI; and
- geophysical survey using ground-penetrating radar, magnetometry, and electromagnetic conductivity, aimed at the high resolution mapping of the site’s buried remains.
Various areas of this site were the subject of archaeological excavation from 1979–1998, which recovered tantalizing glimpses of a thriving Late Bronze Age urban centre, including monumental buildings, wealthy tombs, and domestic architecture. Since 2008 the KAMBE Project has been trying to understand how these individual excavation areas were woven together into an urban fabric. The project uses a combination of remote sensing (including geophysics, drone-based aerial survey, photogrammetry, and 3D laser scanning) and excavation to investigate how the urban landscape shaped new patterns of social interaction at this critical time in the Cypriot past