Abstract Our understanding of the earliest Iron Age on Cyprus has long remained somewhat obscure. This is the result of both a relative lack of material evidence and the fact that scholarly attention has focused more on the preceding Late Bronze Age and on the subsequent Cypro-Archaic period. As more, and more varied, data have accumulated, there have been calls for a more theoretically informed approach to considering the social changes involved, and even for prehistorians to extend their work into the Cypriot Iron Age. As a response to this, the present study considers a broad range of material and documentary evidence, attempts to reconstruct the political economy, and offers an interpretative framework based on social understandings of Complex Adaptive Systems theory. Using this approach, the authors conclude that, while the enduring realities of Cyprus—its geography, copper resources and long tradition of agropastoralism—continued to shape Cypriot culture, the Iron Age is not simply a continuation of its Bronze Age sociopolitical forms. We argue instead that the earliest Iron Age involved social actors negotiating new politico-economic agendas in response to changing conditions in the Iron Age eastern Mediterranean.
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