Hellenic Voice
Hellenic Voice celebrates Greek Culture. In each episode, we explore literature, poetry, archaeology, theater, the Greek language, and the connection of Hellenism with other cultures, as well as with Philhellenes around the world.
Hellenic Voice
Cyprus Through the Ages: A Conversation with Archaeologist Dr Michael Given
In this episode of Hellenic Voice, archaeologist Dr Michael Given shares insights from over three decades of research in Cyprus, exploring the deep connection between people and the island’s landscapes.
He reflects on what first drew him to Cyprus and how its hills, coastlines, trees, and waters shaped the daily lives of past communities. At Kourion, one of Cyprus’s most iconic archaeological sites, Dr Given discusses discoveries that reveal life before and after the great earthquake of the 370s AD, and highlights the crucial role of local communities in Kourion and Episkopi who have long supported and enriched archaeological work.
Looking beyond Kourion, he speaks about surveys across the island that trace settlements from the Stone Age to modern times — uncovering the enduring dialogue between humans and nature. Through his reflections, Dr Given reminds us that studying the past is also a way of understanding how we live with the land today.
Στο επεισόδιο αυτό της εκπομπής HellenicVoice, ο αρχαιολόγος Δρ. Μάικλ Γκίβεν μοιράζεται γνώσεις και εμπειρίες από περισσότερες από τρεις δεκαετίες ερευνών στην Κύπρο, διερευνώντας τον βαθύ δεσμό ανάμεσα στους ανθρώπους και στα τοπία του νησιού.
Ανατρέχει σε όσα τον τράβηξαν αρχικά προς την Κύπρο και περιγράφει πώς οι λόφοι, οι ακτογραμμές, τα δέντρα και τα νερά του νησιού διαμόρφωσαν την καθημερινή ζωή των παλαιότερων κοινοτήτων. Στο Κούριο, έναν από τους πιο εμβληματικούς αρχαιολογικούς χώρους της Κύπρου, ο Δρ. Γκίβεν μιλά για τα ευρήματα που αποκαλύπτουν τη ζωή πριν και μετά τον μεγάλο σεισμό της δεκαετίας του 370 μ.Χ., και υπογραμμίζει τον καθοριστικό ρόλο των τοπικών κοινοτήτων στο Κούριο και στην Επισκοπή, οι οποίες για χρόνια στηρίζουν και εμπλουτίζουν το αρχαιολογικό έργο.
Ξεπερνώντας τα όρια του Κουρίου, αναφέρεται στις έρευνες που πραγματοποιήθηκαν σε ολόκληρο το νησί, οι οποίες ιχνηλατούν οικισμούς από τη Λίθινη Εποχή έως τα νεότερα χρόνια — αποκαλύπτοντας τον διαχρονικό διάλογο ανάμεσα στον άνθρωπο και τη φύση. Μέσα από τις σκέψεις του, ο Δρ. Γκίβεν μας υπενθυμίζει ότι η μελέτη του παρελθόντος είναι και ένας τρόπος να κατανοήσουμε πώς ζούμε και συνυπάρχουμε με τη γη σήμερα.
Music by Evanthia Reboutsika. Used with permission. Thank you for letting us feature your music!
Welcome to Hellenic Voice, the podcast that celebrates Greek culture. In each episode, we explore literature, poetry, archaeology, theatre, the Greek language, and the connections of Hellenism with other cultures as well as with the Hellenes around the world. And today I'm thrilled to be joined by Michael Given, professor of landscape archaeology at the University of Glasgow, who has spent over 30 years exploring the archaeology of Cyprus. Michael, it's wonderful to have you on the podcast. And to start, I'd love to hear about your connection to Cyprus. What was it about the island that captivates you and made it a central part of your archaeological work for over three decades?
SPEAKER_00:Okay, well, thank you very much for inviting me. Yes, partly it was an accident of starting to work in Cyprus because I talked to the man, the professor who was uh going to be my supervisor when I started my PhD, and I wasn't quite sure where I wanted to work. So he said, Have you thought about Cyprus? And I hadn't. So I went there. I went went there that summer and I spent a couple of weeks there, and I just loved it. It's a beautiful island. People were really friendly. It was just such a pleasant place to be. The archaeology, of course, was great, but so was the history and the landscape and the environment and uh and everything. So I said, yes, this is for me, and I never stopped going back.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you so much. And uh you've spent, as I said, a huge part of your career studying um how people lived in Cyprus and how did the natural landscape, the trees, soil, water, and animals um shape the way uh people lived in the past. Were there particular aspects of the of this study um that you found fascinating, exceptionally interesting?
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so uh thank you. That's that's interesting. Um well partly this comes from visiting a place like Cyprus and especially working along the northern edge of the Trovados Mountains, um, which are really, really beautiful. The natural environment is, and you see that today, and you think, isn't nice to be here. There are these little valleys, there's uh uh small rocky cliffs, or there's great boulders, there's the lovely pine trees, and there's you know, partridges and all sorts of things. But that's really the starting point because you think, yes, this is all very beautiful, and then of course the environment is really important for us today. It's where we get our food from, our health from, the clean air, our clean water. That all comes from the environment. And that's how it was for people in the past as well. So I started to sort of explore that. And you know, I see, you know, you're um there with the nice trees around you in the lower parts of the mountains. Well, how were trees important for the people 2,000 years ago, say? And it turns out that, of course, trees were really important. Um, trees of Cyprus, the pines were really important for building ships, uh, including their masts. And you need a really amazing, tall, straight tree um to make a mast. But uh you could also use them for uh fuel, for power. So Cyprus keep copper, it was famous for its copper in antiquities, uh, in antiquity, and you could never have uh made copper unless you had the trees for your fuel uh to fire the smelting the smelting ovens. And you've heard about Roman baths, you never get a Roman bath unless you have trees for the fuel uh uh to warm up uh all of the water. But then just locally as as well. Um trees were important in all sorts of ways because before plastic, um you made everything in your kitchen was made either out of pottery, which archaeologists also find, of course, um, and and wood. And people just knew, people were really skilled at identifying different trees, different plants, and knowing what they were they were good for. So there's one sort of tree, um the golden oak, which is quite a small uh oak tree, and it grows to you know quite high uh in the mountains, la ja in uh in Cypriot Greek. Um and you can copposite if you you know the techniques, which means you cut off all of the stems low down and they grow up again. Uh and this makes these long thin poles which are perfect for tools like the handle of a spade, or for making into charcoal, or for burning in the winter when you're cold, or for your cooking fire, or for your your oven out in the courtyard. So people really knew they could they were like botanists. They could identify the different plants and know what they were good for and the different trees and so on.
SPEAKER_02:So would you uh say that uh starting the landscape help you understand the culture and society in new ways?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, so uh certainly, yes. Uh because it's very easy, particularly if you're just rereading the histories, that the your your understanding of a society or a culture, particularly in the past, is all about its politicians or its kings and its queens and it uh it its generals, and you don't really understand how ordinary people like you and me lived. You know, people out in the village or on a farm or whatever. And when you're actually exploring the landscape they lived in, so you found the village because there are the ruins of it, or you can see the pottery on the ground, uh, but you can actually figure out what sort of pots they were using to cook, what trees they were using for making their tools, where did they get their water from, where did they grow their crops, and it's very, very specific and it it's it's quite a feeling. You're you're standing in some beautiful little valley, um, and there's a couple of ruined houses there, and you can actually not quite experience their lives, but you can understand a bit of what it was like. The weather when they went out because they had to work so hard in the fields. Maybe they had to go you know two or three miles away to get to uh where the the trees were that they needed to bring back for firewoods or whatever. And for me, that's my sort of history. That's really why I'm an archaeologist, not a political historian or something, because you're really understanding how people lived actually in the places where they lived. And for me, that that's very special.
SPEAKER_02:What about the animals? Uh uh, you know, they played uh a big role in Cypriot society, both practically and symbolically. What can archaeological studies of animal remains uh reveal about these relationships?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, uh-huh. Um well, just from the archaeological evidence, we find a lot of uh animal bones. Um so, for example, when we were excavating at Curion, um, there was a big dump where um people 1700 years ago uh cleared up after the remains of uh the destruction of a terrible earthquake. And there's lots of animal bones in there. And um they liked some lamb, um, but what they really liked was beef. So we found a lot of cattle bones, um, including some that had been chopped up, so they um what we call they'd been butchered, because when a bone is cut, we knew it wasn't just an animal that had died, it was an animal that was cut up to be eaten. Or sometimes you just see the marks of the knife uh on the bones. And thanks to the specialists in this, uh they can also tell you how big the goat was or the or the sheep was, whether a lot of them were being killed when they were one year's one year old, for example. So a lot of sheep and goats we find in the Roman period were just killed when they're about one year old, which means they're they're eating them for meat. Because that's when your your lamb was uh big enough to have lots of meat, but not so you know, so old that it was getting a bit you know stringy and tough and uh and not so tasty. So I suppose that you know that's evidence for eating uh uh ancient souflaki.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, I'm sure you love the souflaki as well. Everyone does. So uh what about uh uh religion? Do you think they also used animals for rituals or any other significant or um religious uh events?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, um yes, that uh that that's interesting, and certainly this it's very well known in classical Greece, so sacrifices were really important because you would very carefully um uh kill a perfect, beautiful sheep or calf or whatever, whatever it might be, um, as uh a present for the uh for the gods, and then you'd have a bit of a feast afterwards.
SPEAKER_02:Um but uh in Cyprus there's not quite so much of that sort of information, but um Kurion is really interesting because we have to definitely speak about uh Kurion, and you have a publication specifically about Kourion, so uh we would love to hear about it, please.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I'm always happy to talk about Kurion. Uh the the this famous sanctuary at Kurion called the Sanctuary of Apollo Hilates, uh, was famous throughout the ancient world, you know, throughout half of the Mediterranean pilgrims would come from uh all over. This is over 2,000 years ago. Uh and an awful lot of goat bones in particular uh were excavated from round the altar of the god that was in the middle of this this sanctuary. Um and it seems that the part of the goat that they really liked um was uh were the hind legs. I don't know if it's you know to make chops or so or something like that. Uh but there was an awful lot of those that were found, perhaps as part of the feasting. And it was a great big altar and it was burning, and some of the bones were burned. So that was important that you would sacrifice the animal and then you would burn it on the altar because it was important that the smoke would would go up to heaven or up to Mount Olympus where the gods lived. But the other interesting thing about um Apollo Hilates is um it wasn't just animals that were important, uh, as you asked, and they were, but trees as well. Okay in Kule in ancient Greek. Uh Eli is um uh means is the ancient word for woodland, for uh for forest. So this is Apollo, the woodland god, and uh he had a sacred grove there, and you weren't allowed to cut down any of the trees, and you weren't allowed to kill any of the deer um that sheltered in Apollo's sacred grove because uh Apollo would look after them. And there are some huge cliffs near Curion, and the story is that if you did kill one of the sacred deer in the sacred grove, you would be thrown off one of those cliffs.
SPEAKER_02:Off the cliff.
SPEAKER_00:You're not going to survive that. Um but also you find these little clay models um of people and um uh horses and riders and things, but you also got these little clay models, you know, they're they're they're only 10 or 15 centimeters high. Um, and they're trees, and round them you get people dancing, and standing at the base of the tree with someone playing uh a lyre or the the tambourines. And what it seems is there are these sort of ritual dances where people dance round and round a tree. So trees are absolutely at the same or back the trees again, huh?
SPEAKER_02:This is fascinating. You didn't come across any tree huggers, I guess, you know, because nowadays we do uh see and and end up believing it, to be fair, to be honest, you know, that we get energy from the trees. So I don't know if there are any specific findings uh in archaeology.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, um well, I mean you certainly get energy from uh from trees in a literal way, but yeah, I I I agree with you. You I feel more relaxed when I walk into a beautiful woodland. I'm sure I would walk into Apollo's sacred grove. Um, I think their equivalent was not so much hugging around them, hugging them, but dancing around them. Dancing around them. And that's absolutely gave, I'm sure that gave a lot of energy. That was really important. Trees are uh an expression of life, you know, continuing life. Yes. They're absolutely at the center of this.
SPEAKER_02:I love it. Only imagine this uh picture, this idea. Um you feel the energy and you feel like you want to smile. Now, you've also worked uh closely with the local communities in Courion and the Episcope village over the years. Could you tell us about their role in archaeology over the past 150 years and how they are uh they've contributed to the work?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, of course. And speaking as an archaeologist who's lived in many different villages uh around Cyprus to do field work, one of the other real pleasures about it is just meeting people and learning about their village and learning about the landscape. And um, it's wonderful, it's so interesting, and you learn so much, uh, particularly as an outsider coming in, I don't know the village. Um, so listening to people who do. And um, for many years, as you say, for a good 150 years or more, um, people living in the village have been very knowledgeable um about the history of their village. And so, you know, whenever you you tell someone you're an archaeologist, you say, Oh, yeah, did you know that up on that hill there there's this really ancient church? And up you go, and sure enough, you you find you know just the ruins of a church, which from bits and pieces of the frescoes might be 12th century or or something like that, so people know. And because of that, they've also been employed as archaeologists, as archaeological workers on excavations, you're going back 150 years. And by doing this, they build up tremendous skill. They know the pottery, they know just the feel of the earth, which is really important when you're excavating, because you you you notice as you dig it's a bit different. There's something else going on here. There's a pit or a hole, or being careful not to you disturb or break any of the finds. You just feel the soil's a bit different. Oh, you're coming to a bone, and then you're you do that very carefully. And um because of that, um, foreign archaeologists and more um that's a hundred years ago or so, and then particularly after about the 1940s, 1950s, Cypriot archaeologists have employed teams of local people. And the joy of living in Episcopi, which is the the the village close to Courion where we always stay during field work, um, is that so many people there had worked for on a Bronze Age site here and a Courion on the Acropolis and a Neolithic site over there and some Roman tombs down there, and then they knew all of this.
SPEAKER_02:So um it's amazing how they have this knowledge.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, but the the sad thing is that for a lot of that period, their voices and their knowledge and their expertise was ignored. Uh, so you get someone like Luigi Palma di Cesnola, a famous or infamous archaeologist uh in the uh 1870s uh or so. Um he had all of these amazing workmen. He really relied on the foreman who was a Cypriot, um, and they don't appear in his books at all. They're never even thanked in the beginning. So, what I and some Cypriot colleagues decided to do, um, and you know, particularly thanks to the you know, the the initiative of my colleagues, was to hear the stories of all of these people in the village of Episcopi who had worked on all of these different excavations, and they gave us some photos and they told us stories uh about it and um uh talked about their enthusiasm for it and showed us, you know, one became an expert in Roman-style mosaics, and she had this beautiful mosaic up on her wall of the the partridge, which is a famous mosaic from Curion. And so this book is called Keria Pumilun, the hands which talk because the voices might have been silenced, but the hands that did the work has been part of archaeology in Cyprus for 150 years.
SPEAKER_02:Wow, and I'm sure they felt really excited and happy that uh a non-Greek was there investigating, you know, uh trying to learn about Cyprus, you know, about the history of uh Cyprus. Now, traditional farming practices were closely tied to the landscape. How did the ancient Cypriots adapt uh their articultural methods to the soil and climate?
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Um soil and climate are so important, you think it's just a matter of uh planting your seeds and hoping it rains. But uh in Cyprus, of course, it often doesn't rain. There have been really bad droughts for centuries, for millennia uh in in particular, and looking after the soil was really, really important. Um and it's very very clear that uh a huge amount of effort and again skill and expertise were put into the soil. So you sometimes you can actually see it, like when a bulldozer is you know cut a big trench. Um, if you look a little bit lower down in the soil, particularly if you have a friendly soil scientist with you, which we always try to, you'd actually find an ancient uh agricultural soil because it's better, it's got a good structure, it's been well fertilized, and it's got phosph uh phosphorus and um uh nitrogen and carbon and uh everything in it uh to make the the plants grow. Um, and it's uh very very clear that people had this complex, very sophisticated system of feeding the soil every year. So manure and compost were very uh very important. We've actually found evidence for that, but also it's just doing the work, it's making tools. So the plough is a fantastic invention. Um, and again, you know, you you don't just um you know go to an agricultural supplier's website and order it, and it turns up next day. Uh you um you need the knowledge because different types of wood are used for different parts of it. So the oak is really, really hard. And so you you would use that for the soul, the the bit that actually does the cutting. And you might have uh cypress, the tree, uh cypress tree, um uh is a very good handle because it's got a little bit of a spring in it, so you don't churt your hands when it hits a great big stone uh on underground. Um and so uh we we we learned we learnt a lot about the techniques, about the expertise, about the tools, about the different soils. But also there were some methods that have still been used up to the 1930s in a in a different way, so as society has moved on. But threshing, for example, um, you have the alone, which is this um circular floor, it might be 10 or 15 metres across, um, and that is where you thresh the wheat. Um uh so you would have a sort of a wooden sledge with flint tools, sharp flint blades chipped off from lumps of the very hard stone flint, um were pulled round and round by an ox or a donkey, and that cut up the straw and it broke all the grain off the straw. And the amazing thing was that about that was particularly soon after I started working in Cyprus in the 1980s uh or so. 1980s, um 1990s, uh early 90s, I was able to talk to people who remember doing that. You know, back when they were young, 50 years before then. So hearing those of their stories um and about uh what you do after the threshing's all finished, particularly your people come to help you, then you go to help your uh your neighbor. Well, if people have come to help you, then in the evening it's cool. Okay, you finish the job, you're really happy, so you get some fresh halloumi and some fresh bread, nice tomatoes, and you you invite them all around to be basically on the threshing floor.
SPEAKER_02:A wonderful number. We can learn from archaeology many ecological um ways that we can use you know, nowadays to live. Of course, we will not go back completely to the buttons, but I think we can uh uh adjust, make adjustments uh you know to transform the way we are living now to make it more eco ecological. Any other surprises that you have discovered uh from all this uh um you know your involvement with uh archaeology?
SPEAKER_00:Uh in a way it's all the surprise because being a landscape archaeologist, I don't do very much digging, I do a lot of walking, looking for things, and often in Cyprus it's just a few scraps of pottery in a field, and they always bring surprises. I remember once this was near the village of Politico in um the central part of the Troodos Mountains along the northern edge. And we'd spent the morning, we didn't find very much stuff, but we found a nice tree, like a farmer, you find a nice olive tree or something like that to sit under in the shade to have your lunch, and we're eating our lunch and um looked down and picked something um off the soil beside me, and it was a sort of reddish-orange shirt, it was quite thick, you know, just a little scrap of pottery, and we realized it was Chalcolithic, you know, which is um oh 6,000 uh years old or something like that. And then someone else looked over their shoulder, and oh, here's another one, and here's another, and here's another. And we found this amazing Chalcolithic site, which was a settlement, it was a base for uh for hunting further up the mountains, perhaps. And it was such an interesting and such an important one that afterwards a different team of archaeologists decided they were going to come and excavate it, which they have. So you can never tell what you're gonna find. You might find nothing, you might find this amazing Calcolithic site. Who knows?
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. Would you say uh these discoveries changed the way you think about Cyprus? I mean, from before you started your excavations or discoveries, you know, and now yes, that's interesting.
SPEAKER_00:Of course, you'll learn you learn more from the uh discoveries, so you understand people's lives in the the past more. But I think the combination of that and talking to people and walking and just being in the landscape, being in the environment, I think you have a better idea of what you were saying about the ecology, um living ecologically, living in the long term, dealing with the difficulties, you know, the droughts or whatever, um, working as a community, you know, helping each other when the the threshing needs done, or if someone's having a problem, which of course people do in a small village, they have arguments in between, but when something is really wrong, they they they come in and help. So there are ways of living with our landscape and environments, and there are ways of living in our communities that really work, they really work in the long term, and of course we still often do that, but you know, sometimes I wonder if the modern world we you know we've lost that way somehow, and we're not living so sustainably, or we're just not in nature, in the environment uh enough. Um and um Cypress is better off than many. Well, what what I love is you you're you're driving along the road in spring, and there's a couple there's a car parked on the edge of the road, and there's a couple of people, you know, uh uh just up in all the vegetation with a bag, and they're picking caper berries or caper flowers or something like that. So yeah, even in Nicosia I found that people still talked about their village or you know, they knew where to go um to find the cape the best caper berries or or uh well um the must the um the the the hawthorns, the mospheli um for the the jam.
SPEAKER_02:Do you think there are more things to discover in Cyprus?
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Always. Always we haven't scratched the surface.
SPEAKER_02:Would you like to go back and cover it?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yes, certainly. Um hoping to go go back next next next summer. Um lots of work to do on the stuff you've found, and you you should.
SPEAKER_02:I'm sure you got used to the weather. The weather now. Now, uh which aspects of Cyprus past do you think are most important for people today to understand?
SPEAKER_00:I suppose part of it is ways of living with your landscape and ways of living in community. Um there's the beauty of things in the past. So I mentioned the Roman mosaics, which are amazing. Even uh ordinary pot can be a very, very beautiful thing. Uh, even the very, very old ones, um like those calcolithic ones I talked about. Some lovely glossy red becoming orange, then becoming a sort of a charcoal grey uh or black. Even ordinary everyday things can be beautiful, particularly if they're made locally out of local things, and you made them yourself and are proud of them, or you know the person who made it as a potter just up in the next village, and you know, you know them and you go and visit them and look at this lovely pot that you you uh you you just got. So it's not necessarily high art, and it's certainly not mass-produced. Um, it's something local that's part of the place and that's grown up with you. Um and your people had things like that for millennia. Uh that that was truly important. Um excellent.
SPEAKER_02:And finally, Michael, um, what advice would you give to young uh archaeologists that they want to uh call that pathway?
SPEAKER_00:Go for it, it's great, fantastic. Um and the thing to do is go and see it, visit the sites, visit the museums, find people to talk to. Um and you know, read you reading about it is great as well. But the big deal is to go go and visit. You can visit the big tourist sites, of course, but then when you get your eye and just go for a walk, you'll find it. It's everywhere. You know, you get your eye and you'll find the pottery in the field, you'll find the ruins of a church or the ruins of a house, um, or um uh a hole in a uh in a cliff face, which turns out to be a two. So it's everywhere. Go and see it. That that's how you learn.
SPEAKER_02:Do you get used to the weather conditions? Because usually we see again on television the archaeologists during rain or even if it's so hot, especially in Cyprus, uh, you know, during summer. Uh, how long it took you to get used to these conditions, uh, weather conditions?
SPEAKER_00:I didn't mind the heat. The heat. Um, I actually got to really like it. You have to be prepared and you bring water and wear your hat and everything. The difficult thing is when you have a team of Scottish students who don't know about that they eat. Um, but yeah, uh yeah, I adapted to that quickly. Um, however, it means I I lived in Cyprus for about three years and spent every summer there for years and years and years. What I haven't quite got used to is the cold and the rain in Scotland. I missed I was in Cyprus living in Glasgow. You know, we're now, you know, last night was the first cold night of the autumn.
SPEAKER_02:So you're still trying to get used to the Scotland uh weather. Well, I must say it's beautiful though. I've been to Scotland and I loved it, and I would love to very difficult. Yeah, the countryside, it looks gorgeous. Very much. Michael, thank you so much for sharing your insights and stories and reflections. It's been fascinating to hear about your work and the credible ways the people of Cyprus interacted with the landscape over the centuries. And to our listeners, I hope this conversation inspires you to explore the rich history and landscapes of Cyprus for yourselves. Thank you for tuning in to Hellenic Voice. I'm Vasula and I look forward to bringing you more fascinating conversations next time. Thank you for listening to Hellenic Voice. If you enjoyed this episode, please support us by sharing it, leaving your comments, and following us on social media so we can continue this journey through Greek culture together. Until the next episode, the voice of Hellenism continues.