Changing pasts and socio-political cognition in Late Bronze Age Cyprus

Changes in burial practice and associated symbolic communication offer important evidence for socio-political history. A significant change in the relevance of the past, marked by a sharp break in funerary practice and a dramatic erasing of tangible memory and history, occurs in the Maroni Valley of southern Cyprus at the beginning of the main 'urban' Late Bronze Age phase, c. 1300 BC. It is argued that this may both be explained by, and help explain, the emergence at this time in the lower Maroni Valley of a radical new power structure: a single, central, ruling authority and figure. The combination of mortuary evidence, architectural history, and precise chronology through imported Aegean ceramics, allows us to approach a high resolution archaeology of socio-political development in the late fourteenth century BC in the Maroni Valley.