Book review: Marki Alonia: An Early and Middle Bronze Age Town in Cyprus - Excavations 1990-1994 by David Frankel and Jennifer M. Webb

This monograph is a lavishly illustrated report on the first phase of fieldwork at Marki Alonia, an important early and middle Bronze Age settlement in central Cyprus. Until recently knowledge of the early Bronze Age in Cyprus was based on evidence (mainly ceramics) from the numerous cemeteries. Since the 1970s excavations at several settlement sites have attempted to redress this. The work at Marki by an Australian team based at La Trobe University is a major contribution to this re-evaluation. Marki Alonia was occupied from about 3500 to 3800 BP. The mud brick settlement was rebuilt on several occasions and is made up of the conjoined (rectilinear agglomerative) apartments characteristic of many Cypriot villages today. Despite proximity to strategic copper mines in the foothills of the Troodos mountains, Marki Alonia seems to have been a predominantly agricultural community of about 300-500 people, with a mixed farming economy based on wheat and barley, olives, pulses, and grapes and with sheep, goats and cattle as the principle livestock.

This monograph sets the site in regional context, presents an account of the construction history of the settlement, looks at abandonment and discard processes associated with the phases of rebuilding, and grapples with the problems of determining room function and identifying household units. There is an excellent section on stratigraphic analysis and application of Harris matrices to a complex site. A series of specialist reports on prehistoric vegetation, pottery provenance, and subsistence economy complement a detailed corpus of small finds (grinding stones, ornaments, gaming pieces, tokens, ceramic wares, cooking hobs, figurines, beads, buttons, spindle whorls, loom weights and metal needles) giving a strong impression of the diverse array of material remains produced by an eastern Mediterranean agricultural community. There is even a passable report on chipped stone artefacts (mainly backed sickle blades) at the site. The finds suggest an influx of people into Cyprus in the early Bronze Age and so, at Marki, Frankel and Webb also face those perennial archaeological questions of ethnicity, migration and technology transfer.

Frankel and Webb have earned a reputation for the quality of their excavation methods and reflective and innovative analyses. This report lives up to expectations. At $120 the monograph is expensive but well worth a look. It should be of broad interest to those dealing with the archaeology of settlements; to Australian prehistorians keen to reflect on the types of evidence left by societies other than hunter-gatherers; and of course to the many readers of AA who have worked at Marki over the last five years. It will be of most direct relevance however to scholars curious about the processes which transformed the small decentralised agricultural communities of the early Bronze Age to the city states, urban centres and centralised regional economic systems of the late Bronze Age.