‘Abandonment’: Archaeology in the service of society
Ruined chapel of Saint Herakleios in the Xeros River Valley, Image © Adamos Papantoniou
'Abandonment' is an interdisciplinary event, comprising talks and a photographic exhibition, which took place recently under the umbrella of the Unlocking Sacred Landscapes (UnSaLa) research network, which is concerned with the study of the temporality, spatiality and materiality of Mediterranean sacred landscapes through time. The UnSaLa Network is based on an agreement of collaboration between the Department of Classics, Trinity College Dublin and the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus, and it encourages direct contact and research cooperation, such as joint research activities, exchange of faculty members, postdoctoral fellows and research associates for lectures and network meetings, exchange of graduate and undergraduate students for study and research, co-organisation and participation in lectures, seminars and conferences, and co-organisation of teaching activities and training courses. A further mission of the UnSaLa network is public engagement and service to society. We strongly support the idea that Humanities, and Classics in particular, can play a significant role in societal change and the creation of a more human-centered and empathetic society. This is growing into a key role for UnSaLa in the context of social service and responsibility, as exemplified by our ‘Abandonment’ event which took place in Cyprus in July 2021.
'Abandonment' was created through a collaboration between UnSaLa and the Huntington’s Disease Association of Cyprus, the Larnaca Photographic Society, the Cyprus Archaeological, Ethnographic & Historical Film Festival and research projects funded by the Cyprus Research and Innovation Foundation (hosted by the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation). Its overall purpose was to raise awareness for Huntington’s disease, a neurological condition caused by an expanded gene in the DNA. The faulty Huntington’s gene causes cells in parts of the brain to gradually malfunction and die. As brain cells die, the person experiences changes in movement, thinking, and emotions. The event included a lecture: ‘Abandonment, from place to human beings’ by Giorgos Papantoniou; an interactive seminar: ‘Abandonment, from human beings to the rare disease’ by systemic psychotherapist Andri Christoudia-Gumuskut; and the book-launch of ‘Hurry Up and Wait’, a cognitive care companion for Huntington’s Disease by Jimmy Pollard (translated into Greek by Dimitra Karoulla-Vrikki for the Huntington’s Disease Association of Cyprus). In addition, the event included a photographic exhibition based around landscape archaeology, with collectable photographs available for sale exclusively in support of the Association.
Landscape archaeology is concerned with the mapping and understanding of sites according to their functional and hierarchical places within a broader social system. Analysis of spatial structures is expressive of social structures. As archaeologists and material-culture historians we study spatiality in relation to the creation of various personal and communal identities and we regard material culture as active and meaningfully constituted. Thus meaning governs everyday social relations rather than passively reflecting them. Contemporary scholarship regards ‘embodiment’ as a key approach to understanding materiality, addressing the locus of the body as a material grounding for subjective experience, but also as the objectification of moral values and bodily ideas. ‘Things’, like people, have agency, or at least, material objects are given meaning within agency. The characteristics of objects are important but what manifests social power is the dialectic between landscapes, people, and ‘things’. 'Abandonment' may take different forms and faces. Usually, intentionally or unintentionally, or as a result of coercion, we abandon objects, places and people. Involuntarily or voluntarily, we witness or perform abandonment on a daily basis. Buildings, landscapes, objects that were once valuable goods or places of association are abandoned to time. Even more shocking is human abandonment, where individuals abandon themselves and their people, or are abandoned by them. Abandonment becomes even more severe when a neurological condition, such as Huntington’s Disease, is involved. This is the framework in which the UnSaLa network operated this event, bringing together public history and archaeology, psychology, medical humanities, art and cultural heritage.
During the same month, and in the same context, during the 4th Cyprus Ethnographic & Historical Film Festival we organised another public day with a documentary and a photographic exhibition on our landscape and community archaeology research in the Xeros River Valley in Cyprus. An overall sense of abandonment and negative collective memory characterise nowadays the rural landscape of the Xeros valley, occupied continuously from the prehistory to today. The area is a locus of both coexistence and conflict: between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots during the years of inter-communal unrest in the 1960s; a place of settlement of Greek-Cypriot refugees but also the abandonment of Turkish-Cypriot quarters due to population movements following the 1974 invasion; a site of the former state-run abattoir; and the location of the Reception and Accommodation Centre for Applicants for International Protection in Kophinou (a second ‘refugee settlement’). These are all facets that make up the contemporary landscape of the Xeros valley today.
The centrality of this 'un-central' landscape in antiquity and its present abandonment are imprinted on collective memory and on the archaeological and modern landscapes. Abandoned Turkish-Cypriot settlements, Christian and Muslim religious monuments in Kophinou and Alaminos, the Turkish-Cypriot cemetery of Kophinou, abandoned military bunkers on the hilltops around Kophinou from the period of inter-communal strife, the medieval tower and the Ottoman watermill of Alaminos, stone bridges of the British colonial period, abandoned beehives and other exceptional examples of traditional culture on the island comprise landmarks of this collective memory in the landscape of the valley today. At the same time, the presence and coexistence of these monuments in the Xeros valley in the 21st century reflect timeless and current phenomena: prosperity and symbiosis, displacement, immigration and human suffering, creation of national and religious identities, destruction of sacred sites and secular buildings, and abandonment.
Adamos Papantoniou, our photographer, has captured the experience of archaeologists in the landscape, but also how antique monuments as well as those of the recent past in the valley demarcate (positively or negatively) collective memories today. A photographic exhibition ‘Surveying Memories’ was accompanied by a public lecture by Athanasios K. Vionis (University of Cyprus) and the documentary ‘Settled and Sacred Landscapes in Cyprus: The Xeros River Valley (Larnaca District)’ directed by Stavros Papageorgiou (Tetraktys Films). The documentary narrates the story of the settled development and the cult and other monuments in the Valley, from antiquity to the present, through the innovative methods of landscape archaeology. The project combines field archaeology with Digital Humanities, Ethnography, Psychology, Cultural Heritage Management, and Public and Community Archaeology, projecting the memory and historical identity of the communities of the Xeros Valley throughout the ages. The same event, with some fieldwork participatory activities for children, was run for the communities currently living in the Xeros River Valley.
Photo Gallery
1-2. Abandonment…’, Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation exhibition
3-4. Public/Community archaeology days in the Xeros River Valley
5. The Xeros River Valley
6. Surveying Memories
7. Astathkiotissa Church in the Xeros River Valley
8. Astathkiotissa Church in the Xeros River Valley
9. Rust, at Dora village
Images 5-9 © Adamos Papantoniou
Further Reading:
Papantoniou, G., and Vionis, A. K. 2018. “The River as an Economic Asset: Settlement and Society in the Xeros Valley in Cyprus”. Land 7.157: https://doi.org/10.3390/land7040157.
Papantoniou, G., Morris, C. E., and Vionis, A. K. 2019. “Spatial Analysis of Ritual and Cult: An Introduction”. In Unlocking Sacred Landscapes: Spatial Analysis of Ritual and Cult in the Mediterreanean. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology 151, edited by G. Papantoniou, C. E Morris, and A. K. Vionis, ix-xviii. Nicosia: Astrom Editions.
Ioannou, E., Lanitis, A., Vionis, A.K., Papantoniou, G., and Savvides, N. 2021. “Augmented Reality Cultural Route at the Xeros River Valley, Larnaca, Cyprus”. In Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection. 8th International Conference, EuroMed 2020, Virtual Event, November 2-5, 2020, Revised Selected Papers 12642, edited by M. Ioannides, E. Fink, L. Cantoni, and E. Champion, 695-702. Cham: Springer.
Giorgos Papantoniou (he/him)
Giorgos is an Assistant Professor in Ancient Visual and Material Culture in the Department of Classics, Trinity College Dublin