“CENTURIES OF DARKNESS” REVISITED: ANOTHER LOOK AT THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE FROM CYPRUS, BETWEEN CA. AD 150 AND AD 350
“CENTURIES OF DARKNESS” REVISITED: ANOTHER LOOK AT THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE FROM CYPRUS, BETWEEN CA. AD 150 AND AD 350

Author(s): John Lund
Subject(s): Archaeology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Cyprus; second to fourth century AD; excavations; surveys; Nea Paphos; Soloi; Salamis; Kourion; crisis; connectivity; climatic change; Empire-wide diseases; Late Antique recovery
Summary/Abstract: The contribution takes a fresh look at the archaeology of Cyprus between ca. AD 150 and 350, departing from a review of the excavations and surveys carried out in the island over the last decades. The evidence suggests that some settlements – particularly in the central and northern parts of the island – had by then been abandoned and that economic activities were at a low level elsewhere, even if Nea Paphos, Soloi, Salamis and Kourion were apparently less severely affected. Some scholars have seen these developments as symptoms of a crisis. The situation may in part be explained with a shift in the productive and/or trading frameworks of the Eastern Mediterranean that seems to have occurred aft er about AD 150. Connectivity between Cyprus and the Western Mediterranean deteriorated, the climate changed for the worse, and Empire-wide diseases may have caused a demographic downturn. However, the underlying reasons were no doubt more complex than that, and there seems to have been a resurgence under the Severans. Recovery seems to have set in during the first half of the fourth century AD, and Late Antiquity is commonly regarded as a flourishing period in Cyprus.

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