American Journal of Archaeology

The Late Bronze Age was a period of profound transformation on the island of Cyprus. Through investigations at the Maroni complex and at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios—two urban centers in south-central Cyprus—the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments (KAMBE) Project seeks to understand the relationship between these changes and the coeval rise of the island’s first cities. Here we discuss the results of new work at Ayios Dhimitrios, where the collection of high-resolution data is providing new insights into the emergence and development of this Late Bronze Age urban landscape. Our work has focused on two areas: (1) a monumental court-centered building (Building XVI) with possible evidence for feasting and (2) the approach to the city’s administrative core, which was monumentalized through a series of construction phases. We argue that cities are produced by the place-making activities of their inhabitants at various scales, and our investigations in these two areas of Ayios Dhimitrios provide compelling evidence for elite place making through which the urban environment shaped, and was shaped by, new patterns of movement, social interaction, and daily practice. Comparison with the nearby and largely contemporaneous Maroni complex reveals that the first cities on Cyprus took rather divergent paths to becoming urban.

Kassite Babylonia counts among the great powers of the Late Bronze Age Near East. Its kings exchanged diplomatic letters with the pharaohs of Egypt and held their own against their Assyrian and Elamite neighbors. Babylonia’s internal workings, however, remain understood in their outlines only, as do its elite’s expansionary ambitions, the degrees to which they may have been realized, and the nature of ensuing imperial encounters. This is especially the case for the region to the northeast, where the Mesopotamian lowlands meet the Zagros piedmonts in the Diyala River valley and where a series of corridors of movement intersect to form a strategic highland-lowland borderland. In this paper, we present critical new results of regional survey in the Upper Diyala plains of northeast Iraq and excavations at the Late Bronze Age site of Khani Masi. Not only do our data and analyses expand considerably the known extent of Babylonia’s cultural sphere, but also the monumental character of Khani Masi and its wider settlement context prompt a fundamental rethinking of the nature and chronology of Babylonian presence in this transitional landscape. As such, this paper contributes an important new case study to the field of archaeological empire and borderland studies.