An Ethnography of Looting: Constructing Alternative Archaeologies in Modern Cyprus

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent shifts in archaeology have brought nuanced perspectives to undocumented digging and looting, acknowledging social justice issues tied to subsistence digging and expanding the definition of archaeology to embrace alternative and indigenous understandings of cultural heritage. Our project examines local, unscientific ways of understanding the past, challenging who has the right to own and interpret cultural heritage using Athienou, Cyprus, as a case study. Through interviews conducted between 1990–1995 with local looters, their descendants, and key figures involved in the antiquities market from the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, we aim to uncover previously unrecorded or marginalized local perspectives on cultural heritage. These interviews are contextualized alongside evidence of looting uncovered by the Athienou Archaeological Project and archival records. This research, grounded in archaeological ethnography and autoethnography, complicates the narratives around undocumented excavation and constructs an alternative archaeological history of the region. The evolving attitudes toward cultural heritage in Athienou reflect broader societal changes in Cyprus in the 19th-20th centuries, offering a microcosmic view of the island’s complex relationship with its past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53482