The AMNE department is delighted to congratulate Kevin Fisher on being
this year’s recipient of the G. Ernest Wright Award from the American Schools for Overseas Research for his book, Monumentality, Place-Making and Social Interaction on Late Bronze Age Cyprus (2023). This prestigious award is given to the author/editor of the most substantial volume(s) dealing with archaeological material, excavation reports and material culture from the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean.
Congratulations to Dr. Fisher on this significant achievement.
The book’s description, from the publisher’s website, reads:
This book adopts an integrative approach to investigate the role of monumental architecture in shaping social dynamics and power relations on the island of Cyprus during the Late Bronze Age (LBA; c.1700-1050 BCE). Using such an approach, archaeologists studying ancient societies elsewhere can analyze the relationship between the built environment and human behaviour.
Monumental buildings on Late Bronze Age Cyprus provided contexts for social interactions, such as ceremonial feasting and cultic rituals, that created social bonds and forged wider community identities, while also materializing social boundaries and inequalities. More than just spaces, these contexts were socially-constructed places, imbued with identity and memory, that played an integral role in social organization during this transformative period.
This integrative approach emphasizes the role of buildings in configuring movement and encounter and in serving as the contexts for interactions through which sociopolitical relations are developed, maintained, transformed and reproduced. It investigates this using an interdisciplinary methodology that integrates access analysis with the study of the materiality of built environments and how they encode and communicate meanings and shape the experiences of those who interact with them.
The book is available for purchase on the Equinox Publishing website.
Kevin Fisher is an Associate Professor of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and co-director of the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments (KAMBE) Project, a collaborative and interdisciplinary investigation of the relationships between urban landscapes, social interaction, and social change on the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus during the Late Bronze Age (or Late Cypriot period, c. 1650-1100 BCE).
