GIS and Place-Making in Late Bronze Age Cyprus: Prospects and Challenges

The “spatial turn” in history and archaeology has brought a growing recognition of the importance of built environments as both product and producer of social life in past societies.  Such an approach focuses on places—“lived” spaces imbued with meanings, identities and memories that actively shape, and are shaped by the daily practice and experiences of their inhabitants and historically contingent social processes.  At the same time, GIS, with its ability to store, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of spatial data, has become an important tool for archaeologists investigating a wide range of spatial phenomena, leading many researchers to join the increasingly crowded “GIS bandwagon”.  But how well suited is it for studying place?  While current approaches to modeling visibility and movement in past environments have gone some way toward responding to the charges of environmental determinism leveled at early GIS studies, what is the potential for this spatial technology to illuminate the experiential elements that are an integral part of place-making?

I examine these issues through the current work of the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments Project, which is using GIS to integrate and analyze a number of data streams derived from extensive geophysical survey, test excavations, and 3D laser scanning and modeling.  The project’s main objective is to investigate the relationship between urban landscapes, interaction and social change in south-central Cyprus during the Late Bronze Age (ca.1700-1100 BCE)—a period in which new built environments were constructed that played an important role in the profound social transformations that accompanied the rapid rise of the island’s first “civilization”.  I explore the potential and challenges for GIS-based investigations of place-making at a variety of scales, from urban landscapes through individual architectural spaces.