FRIENDS OF ASOR WEBINARS
Kalavasos and Maroni Revisited: New Explorations of Late Bronze Age Urban Landscapes in Southcentral Cyprus
Friends of ASOR present the next webinar of the 2025-2026 season on April 15, 2026, at 7:00 pm EDT, presented by Kevin Fisher. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.
Compared with some of its better-known neighbors in the ancient eastern Mediterranean and Near East, Cyprus sees the relatively late emergence of urbanism. Its first cities appear in the Late Bronze Age (c. 1700-1100 BCE), along with other changes to the built environment, including large-scale monumental architecture and new types of domestic and mortuary architecture. At the same time, we see changes to the economy and sociopolitical organization as the island became a key player in an increasingly interconnected world. This talk presents the results of recent work by the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments (KAMBE) Project, a collaborative and interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between urban landscapes and social change in south-central Cyprus during the Late Bronze Age. It focuses mainly on Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, an urban center that flourished in the 13th century BCE, where earlier excavations revealed wealthy tombs, monumental buildings and industrial-scale olive oil production. There, remote sensing, excavations, and various specialist studies are revealing fascinating new evidence for ritual activity and monumental construction near the administrative and economic core of the city. We’ll contrast these findings with evidence from the contemporaneous urban center of Maroni, about 7 km away, where the KAMBE project is revealing a rather different story of urban development.
Kevin Fisher is an anthropological archaeologist interested in the relationship between people and their built environments; urbanism and the social dynamics of ancient cities; and the application of remote sensing and digital technologies for recording, analyzing and visualizing archaeological phenomena. His research focuses mainly on the early complex societies of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, especially Cyprus, although he has worked on projects in Greece, Jordan, Peru, Guatemala, the US and Canada. He is currently Associate Professor of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and co-director of the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments (KAMBE) Project, which is investigating the relationship between urban landscapes, interaction and social change on Late Bronze Age Cyprus (c. 1700-1100 BCE). Kevin was awarded ASOR’s 2025 G. Ernest Wright Award for his book Monumentality, Place-making and Social Interaction on Late Bronze Age Cyprus (Equinox 2023) and is co-editor with Andrew Creekmore of Making Ancient Cities: Space and Place in Early Urban Societies (Cambridge 2014).