Investigating Imperialism on Early Hellenistic Cyprus: Excavations at Pyla-Vigla, 2019 and 2022

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since 2008, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP) has been excavating the site of Pyla-Vigla, located on a small plateau near Larnaca, Cyprus. Early small-scale excavations (2008, 2009, 2012, 2018) revealed what appears to be an early Hellenistic (330-250 BCE) fortification. In the early Hellenistic period, Cyprus was undergoing a massive political and cultural transformation, as the island moved from being ruled by a heterogeneous collection of city-kingdoms to eventual incorporation as a province of the Ptolemaic Egyptian state. With little evidence of substantive later occupation, Vigla is an ideal case study for examining fortifications as mechanisms of imperial consolidation and coercion in a pre-modern context, both in terms of the physical markers of an imperial presence (i.e. the fort itself) and in terms of the people who were the instruments of consolidation (i.e. the soldiers resident at the fortification). Beginning in 2019, a larger-scale program of excavation was begun at Vigal, focusing on clarifying the occupation history of the site; defining the nature and extent of the fortification system; examination of the early-Hellenistic ceramic corpus; and examination of domestic activity areas. This poster presents the results of excavations in 2019/2022, focusing on the fortification system and domestic areas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35999.0