a more professional approach to research by the British archaeological establishment. The impetus for this development was clearly from classical, rather than western Asiatic, archaeologists, as the former found Cyprus to be a freely accessible field as it was the only area for classical archaeology under British rule. This move can be seen as part of a generally negative attitude toward turkey and the Ottoman Empire by western Europeans and the extension of a long-standing philhellenic attitude. These biases—cultural, political, and academic—resulted in several factors that were to have lasting effects on archaeological research on the island. One is the tendency to view the island from the Hellenic west, rather than the east, and a related tendency to see Cyprus as an intermediary between the two cultural hemispheres of Asia and Europe. Another—no less important—factor was the establishment of English as the first language of Cypriot archaeology instead of either Greek or Turkish.

The Cyprus Exploration Fund sponsored the excavation of several sites on the island during most of the1890s, principally under the aegis of the British Museum. The various participants brought an increased professionalism to the archaeology of the island, although work was not always up to contemporary standards. The research of one member, john l. myres, was of a far higher quality than that of his colleagues, and the Catalogue of the Cyprus Museum, published by Myres and Ohnefalsch-Richter in 1899, and Myres’s subsequent Handbook of the Cesnola Collection of Antiquities (1914), established many of the basic structures that still condition archaeological thought. For example, his classification of pottery provided the basis for all future work. Another crucial development was the introduction of the formal divisions of the Bronze Age, following the system developed on Crete by sir arthur evans and applied more widely in the Aegean.

An equally, if not more, significant development occurred in the 1920s. As the result of an accidental meeting with Luki Pierides, a scion of an important Cypriot family whose members had a long-standing and sophisticated interest in the history and antiquities of the island, the Swedish classical archaeologist Axel Persson sent a doctoral student to work on the island. einar gjerstad’s thesis, Studies on Prehistoric Cyprus (Gjerstad 1926), reviewed all available data on the Bronze Age and supplemented that data with new stratigraphic excavations at several sites.

Gjerstad revised and elaborated earlier pottery classifications, he used technological and formal characteristics to segment wares into typological series with clear chronological associations, and the proportional seriation of wares in his stratified sequences replaced the earlier presence/absence seriations used for tomb material by Myres. This change allowed Gjerstad to subdivide the Bronze Age into finer chronological units, which he did by developing a formal tripartite division for each of the three major periods—an approach that Myres criticized. Myres would have preferred to see the introduction of a more fluid system, along the lines of the sequence-dating system developed by william matthew flinders petrie in Egypt, but Myres’s suggestion was never followed and Cypriot archaeology has remained structured by Gjerstad’s rigid set of chronological referents.

The dominance of Gjerstad’s approach was ensured by the work of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, which changed the archaeological landscape of the island. Following his doctoral research, Gjerstad devoted himself to raising funds for a major research project on Cyprus, and from 1927 to 1931, he and three Swedish colleagues excavated their way around the island. They formed an exceptionally efficient and professional team, and as they dug, they processed the finds, and within a few years the basic volumes of site reports were published. It took another forty years for the final summary volumes to appear, but these included more comprehensive studies of material and were not confined to the immediate results of the expedition.

The Swedish Cyprus Expedition was not the only expedition working on the island, but its work was by far the most substantial in scale. From the 1930s onward, the pace of research increased. Minor work—such as rescue excavations of tombs discovered during building works or being plundered by looters—was carried