At the heart of ancient Greece lay a small city perched on a mountainside – Delphi.1 At the heart of Delphi was the temple of Apollo, where delegations from cities far and wide, even beyond Greece, would come for answers and advice. And at the heart of the temple was a woman, the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo and mouthpiece of the god (Figure 17). For a thousand years successive Pythias occupied this position as ‘the voice at the center of the world’, until the oracles eventually ran dry in the fourth century and then pagan cults were outlawed by the Roman emperor Theodosius in the ad 390s.2 Around 480 bc, the Pythia was a woman called Aristonice. Her words have reverberated through western history.

The small island of Gozo lies just a short distance northwest of Malta, in the central Mediterranean. People arrived on the islands in the sixth millennium BC.1 In the later fourth millennium BC Maltese lifestyle changed and more complex societies were developed; this Temple Period is known for its megalithic monuments, which are often regarded as temples, and for its hypogea – caves and chambers. Over the course of this long period, many of the ‘temples’ were constructed, maintained and rebuilt repeatedly, suggesting a stable way of life on the islands. Around 2300 BC or sometime earlier, this lifestyle, and the Temple Period, came to an end for reasons that are unclear, and the island even appears deserted – though archaeologists will state that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.2 Nevertheless, the striking archaeological remains of prehistoric Malta and Gozo, the temples, labyrinthine underground complexes, and ‘human’ statues all continue to catch the imagination of modern people.

This chapter synthesizes the book's arguments in a concluding discussion that brings the world of Archaic Cyprus into more substantive conversation on approaches to human-environment relationships writ large, from the horizons of eighth- and seventh-century BCE transformation across the Mediterranean to our contemporary struggles to conceptualize future triangulations of social and environmental change. It first summarizes the explanations for the settlement and land use patterns discernible in the material records from the Vasilikos and Maroni valleys, articulating local heterogeneities with signs of social inequality at the coastal town of Amathus. It then provides a hypothesis for the growth of social complexities during the Iron Age, driven by land management. Finally, Kearns contends that the Archaic countrysides of Cyprus also matter to conversations happening amongst scholars of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, as well as broader public audiences, on the seemingly threatening mediations of society and inequality that our current climatic regimes, and the unruly Anthropocene, present.

In this chapter, Kearns traces the novel politics and communities developing in the neighboring Vasilikos and Maroni river valleys, to the east of the town of Amathus. Their commonly described position as a marginal hinterland provides an opportunity to explore rural dynamics at multiple registers. Survey data and rescue excavations form an evidentiary dataset with which to interrogate the generative ties between clusters of settlements and Amathus that produced unruliness across variable and interconnected scales. One critical theme is continuity and impermanence, and the differentiated patterns of access, appropriation, and management taken up by groups returning to sites of prehistoric and protohistoric occupation. Another is social stratification, which entails the development of local autonomous figures, potential community leaders, or members with elevated status. These actors advanced special relationships with Amathusian authorities and local groups through the construction of gathering places such as cemeteries and shrines. The chapter situates these dynamics in habitation, non-quotidian activity, and land use within a framework of a small near-shore world entangling rural sites with maritime economies.

In the introductory chapter, Kearns begins by looking closely at the Idalion Tablet, one of the surviving inscriptions from fifth-century BCE Idalion, on Cyprus, which lists land property in the territory of the town. She uses the inscription to introduce the main themes and arguments of the book. These include a focus on rural settlements and histories to complement studies of urbanism and attention to environmental changes and human experiences with climate through concepts of weathering and unruliness. To build a critical landscape archaeology, the chapter outlines approaches to ancient countrysides and human-environment relationships that push beyond narratives of societal collapse. Kearns also introduces the case study of Archaic Cyprus, a period of transformative social and environmental change, with which she will examine unruly landscapes. The chapter closes with a guide to the remaining chapters as well as a note on periodization.

This chapter adopts a more granular view to examine three places within the Vasilikos and Maroni region that illustrate the complexities of emergent rural landscapes. Three vignettes center on assemblages of environmental materials, site-level processes, and land use practices, from the copper mines and gypsum outcrops of the Vasilikos Valley to the littoral soils of the Maroni watershed.These landscapes mediated the shifting society-environment interactions taking shape alongside the associated growth of rural networks and the town of Amathus. The chapter presents the methodological integration of survey data, excavated materials, paleoenvironmental data, and geoarchaeological analyses that build a holistic picture of emerging vernacular landscapes and their historically contingent ambiguities and complexities.

This chapter provides a survey of the close of the Late Bronze Age and the rise of Iron Age towns, and delivers an updated synthesis of existing evidence and arguments for climatic shifts across the eastern Mediterranean from the twelfth to fourth centuries BCE. Kearns then undertakes an island-wide comparative analysis of ruralization and urbanization apparent in survey records by the mid-first millennium BCE. Focusing on legacy and recent survey data, the chapter argues for oscillations in sedentism across the island as communities experienced environmental changes and cultivated new weathering practices, and situates the re-emergence of social differentiation in the relationships between households and land and new spaces for public gathering at tombs and shrines.

The preface introduces some of the main themes of the book and acknowledges funding and support.