out by staff of the Department of Antiquities, and porphyrios dikaios was the most important of these workers. In 1931–1932, he carried out major excavations at the early Bronze Age cemetery at Bellapais-Vounous, but his most significant work for the next thirty years was on earlier sites.

His highly professional and extensive excavations at a series of Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement sites, such as khirokitia-vouni, were matched by model site reports. In establishing the basic structures for research Dikaios attempted to place his sites in an evolutionary scheme, tracing developments from one cultural system to another. Many of the difficulties of dating and cultural associations that he grappled with have now become redundant as a result of radiometric dating techniques, but his work is a classic example of the influence of technique and approach on explanation. Many aspects of terminology and the definition of cultures and periods introduced by Dikaios have affected later research.

In contrast to the earlier periods, the archaeology of the early and middle Bronze Ages has until recently been based almost exclusively on tomb material. Dikaios’s work at Bellapais-Vounous was followed by equally extensive excavations by James Stewart, and both projects were initiated largely to salvage material before tombs could be robbed. The value of goods from Bronze Age tombs also encouraged museum-funded research, for foreign excavators could, until Cypriot independence in 1960, expect a generous share of the material excavated. A change in the policy regarding the export of antiquities has had a significant effect on the style, or even the possibility, of fieldwork. It is unlikely, for example, that many teams, including the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, could have obtained the funds to carry out their work without the promise of material rewards to sponsoring countries or institutions.

Apart from the massive losses of material through the looting of sites and the dispersal of thousands of items by nineteenth-century collectors, Cypriot material from scientific excavations is also distributed all around the world, and the attempt to catalog holdings in public museums through the gradual production of a corpus of Cypriot antiquities has done a little to overcome this problem. The series, initiated by Paul Åström, is a specifically Cypriot version of the Corpus Vasorum antiquorum, and it fits well with the object-oriented approach that is common to most Cypriot archaeology.

James Stewart followed his excavations at Bellapais by embarking on a massive early Bronze Age project, but by time of his death in 1962 only an abstract had been completed as one of the final volumes of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition. Stewart’s exhaustive undertaking involved a comprehensive corpus and a complex, idiosyncratic classification of pottery, refining and developing on the ware series set up by Gjerstad, coupled with an intricate—many would say unusable—typology of shape. Stewart could develop a chronology of individual artifacts and tomb groups, but other aspects of analysis or explanation could only be addressed by generalized, ad hoc interpretations of behavior: the primary interest was in developing an artifact-based historical narrative.

Until recently, much of Cypriot archaeology has been characterized by a primarily historical approach, although different issues affect the questions addressed in different periods. The late Bronze Age, in contrast to the preceding periods, is well represented by excavations of settlements, especially the large cities that developed on the coast at that time. These, and the rich tombs associated with them, provide an array of more complex and exotic items, for at the time Cyprus was part of the international trading systems of the eastern Mediterranean. Goods were exported to and imported from Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia, and the Aegean. The rich tombs of the period, with their gold jewelry and exotic pottery, encouraged excavation early on, and the presence of Mycenaean types was of particular interest, for they were tangible evidence of an association with Greece.

Modern Greek Cypriots are naturally interested in when Greeks first came to the island and when the Greek language was introduced, but both earlier and more recent archaeologists have been similarly influenced, especially as the initial researchers came to the island from the