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the reader to the notion that matter is a creative agent, and that it plays a key role in the formation of our material and social worlds. The focus of the book is sediments, soils, clay and earth ‒ materials that surround us and have shaped people’s interactions with the environment since even before the first farmers settled in the Near East tilling the earth, building houses from mud and plaster, and making vessels and figurines from clay. This collection questions orthodox understandings that these substances are inert and an infinite resource for humanity, rather to foreground earthy substances in their relationships with humans, and to show how these materials have co-created our social and material worlds. It is a novel and timely reminder for the reader that our lives have always been embedded within the matter of the E(e)arth.

This paper explores the social lives of gaming stones, a significant number of which have been found at the Late Bronze Age farming settlement of Aredhiou Vouppes, Cyprus. The number of gaming stones found at the site is unprecedented within a Late Cypriot context. Comparatively few are found in the contemporary urban centers, and in general they appear to be more typical of the Middle Cypriot social world. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the agency of these gaming stones, and to consider them as social mediators within the community of Aredhiou. It explores the social and cognitive lives of these objects, examining how they might be transformed and re-imagined as they moved through myriad states of existence throughout their object-life, and thus the various ways in which they were entangled in the social life of the settlement.

Mycenaean decorated pottery has been found in significant quantities on Cyprus and was clearly the focus of a sustained trading endeavour between the island and the Aegean, particularly during the 14th and 13th centuries BC (LH IIIA2-LH IIIB). The bulk of these imports have been found at the urban centres that fringe the island’s coastline, these being the primary mediators of maritime trade; rather less has been found in the hinterland, at the primary production centres ‒ farming, mining and pottery production ‒ although there are concentrations at some of the specialised religious or ceremonial centres such as Myrtou Pigadhes and Athienou. I have previously argued that this apparent disjuncture in the distribution of Mycenaean pottery in part reflects the greater emphasis of excavation at the coastal sites, rather than necessarily a Late Bronze Age reality. Certainly, recent excavations at the inland settlement of Aredhiou have demonstrated that the smaller inland production sites did have sustained access to imported pottery from the Aegean, Egypt and the Levant. This paper reviews the consumption of Mycenaean imported pottery in Late Bronze Age Cyprus, focusing specifically on the hinterland. It provides a comparison between the better-known religious sites of Athienou and Myrtou Pigadhes and the small farming community at Aredhiou Vouppes to allow for a better understanding of the integration of the imported commodities within ritualised practice in the smaller communities situated away from the hustle and bustle of international mercantile trade.

The New Materialisms are part of a wider turn to matter in the humanities and social sciences. This theoretical approach draws attention to matter, exploring the materiality of the world and specifically challenging anthropocentric approaches that prioritize humans over other nonhuman beings and entities. New materialists question dualistic ontologies that separate humans and nonhumans and problematize representationalism as another means of distancing humans from the rest of material world. Key to the New Materialisms is the understanding the matter is not inert and passive, but has agency, distinct from humanist notions of rationality and intentionality. The relationality of the material world, examining how the materials of the world are in relationship, is a key concept in the New Materialisms, although new materialists diverge in how they approach this. Assemblages explore how (im)material entities are continual in flux as the move into and out of relationship, while agential realism argues that the world is not made up of separate bounded entities. Instead, things-in-phenomena emerge from intra-actions and the agency of matter.

There is a rich body of three-dimensional art from Prehistoric Bronze Age Cyprus made in the Red Polished ware. This paper focuses on the Early Cypriot figured bowls from Bellapais Vounoi; it draws upon previous discussions of the materiality of the Red Polished corpus, and how these objects were entangled within human-object relations, with the aim to shed light on how human encounters with these objects created new social and material worlds in the Prehistoric Bronze Age. The primary focus is a consideration of the ancient aesthetic, questioning why modern scholarship has tended to move away from viewing ancient modelled worlds as ‘art’. In part this draws upon Gell’s notion of enchantment, which recognises that art objects are ‘beautifully made or made beautiful’ (Gell 1992: 43). It invites us to consider that rather than attempting to infer meaning from such material we should bear in mind Bloch’s cautionary tale of Malagasy carvings; these did not ‘mean’ anything, but simply ‘made the wood beautiful’ (Bloch 2005: 41). Are we reading too much into our interpretations – might the Red Polished figurative corpus simply represent beautiful objects made for pleasure, commissioned and enjoyed by an individual and buried with them as a favourite or valued possession?

Plants Matter explores how plants and people live together. This is not only a book about the importance of plants and how people use them, but it argues also that knowing the world is achieved-with plants. In addition to populating the landscape, plants alter human physiology in multiple material ways, through gatherings or through sensorial conversations using the chemistry of taste, perfume, colour, sound and textures. The chapters gathered in this volume offer a range of interdisciplinary perspectives that use ethnographic and ethnobotanical information to explore how the behaviours and capacities of certain plants around the world have enticed, excited and even seduced people to pay attention.

This paper examines the materiality of the Cypriot Base Ring ware through the lens of the new materialisms. Specifically, it draws upon Bennett’s vibrant matter and thing-power, to explore how cultural and technological knowledges of Late Bronze Age Cyprus were informed through material engagements with clay. This approach highlights the agency of matter and illustrates how the distinct capacities of clay (working with water and fire) provoked, enabled and constrained potters’ behaviour, resulting in a distinctive pottery style that was central to the Late Cypriot social and material world. The aim is to demonstrate how people, materials and objects are all matter in relationship, drawing attention to the fluidity, porosity and relationality of the material world.

This paper considers the application of the New Materialisms within archaeology, primarily in response to Witmore’s influential discussion paper: Archaeology and the New Materialisms (2014), specifically his emphasis on things. This we demonstrate is peripheral to the main thrust of the New Materialisms discourse. We unravel complexities in the terminology and consider the etymological and epistemological framework of concepts such as matter and thing. This leads us to consider some important issues that arise applying Deleuzian assemblages to the archaeological record and the potential of employing Barad’s agential realist theory instead. Barad’s concept of phenomena moves beyond the notion of things as separate, bounded entities, emphasizing entanglements of matter, and illustrates how matter (including humans) co-create the material world. Our aim is to demonstrate how engaging with matter rather than things, enables us to better make sense of the material world and our place within it.

This paper examines how water shaped people’s interaction with the landscape in Cyprus during the Bronze Age. The theoretical approach is drawn from the new materialisms, effectively a ‘turn to matter’, which emphasises the very materiality of the world and challenges the privileged position of human agents over the rest of the environment. The paper specifically moves away from more traditional approaches to landscape archaeology, such as central place theory and more recently network theory, which serve to separate and distance people from the physical world they live in, and indeed are a part of; instead it focuses on an approach that embeds humans, and the social/material worlds they create, as part of the environment, exploring human interactions within the landscape as assemblages, or entanglements of matter. It specifically emphasises the materiality and agency of water and how this shaped people’s engagement with, and movement through, their landscape. The aim is to encourage archaeologists to engage with the materiality of things, to better understand how people and other matter co-create the material (including social) world.

This article explores how material culture is used to shape, mediate and transform social relations within contact zones. The aim is to highlight cultural hybridity, namely the material expression of new social practices within a colonial third space. It focuses on the Gaza region of the southern Levant during the later second millennium BC, a cosmopolitan period, illustrated by large-scale movement of goods, raw materials and exotic luxuries over vast distances around the East Mediterranean resulting in cultural connectivity. The Late Bronze Age in the Gaza region is also characterized by Egyptian colonial activity. Consequently, this article examines material evidence for the development of new social practices in the region and in particular the adoption of Egyptian(izing) exotica in the creation and mediation of new hybrid identities. Specifically, it explores the social life of objects at two important Late Bronze Age sites in the region: el-Moghraqa and Deir el-Balah