Hippos, Cows and CAARI: Alan Simmons’ impact on Cypriot Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

When Alan Simmons first arrived on Cyprus in 1985, the Cypriot Neolithic was considered a poorly understood and uninteresting backwater lagging behind the developments of the Levant mainland. IN the mid-1908s, The Khirokitia Culture (KC) was thought to be the first PPN occupation on Cyprus. First identified in the 1930s by the Cypriot archaeologist P. Dikaios, the KC (8000 BP) lacked island precedents and was thought to have been imported wholesale from the Levant. Alan Simmons pioneering work at Akrotiri Aetokremnoss definitively demonstrated a robust occupation on the island nearly 12,000 years BP. Prof. Simmons impacts on Cypriot archaeology go far beyond his highly significant scholarship on the Neolithic. His scholarly work deals with the data of the entire island, despite the modern political differences. He has reached across the communal divide and included Greek and Turkish Cypriot students and colleagues on his excavation teams. He is a strong voice for prehistoric research in the large world of ASOR, a group not uniformly open to prehistorians. Finally, he has made invaluable contributions to the growth and health of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) for whom he currently serves as a trustee.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23747