Greetings!

The village of Steni in the Paphos District offers a sun-drenched picture of what awaits us in Cyprus when we can travel again. CAARI looks forward eagerly to our return! If quiet, however, CAARI’s days have been anything but still. Very important changes have occurred there. This is clear in its dynamic new YouTube presence, bringing a cascade of lectures to our fingertips. We’ll say more about them below, after which we’ll introduce you not just to a new book, but to a fascinatingly new format of book. It is presented by two co-authors and sometime CAARI Trustees, Derek Counts and Erin Averett, and you can experiment with the book right here on site. But there are far more fundamental changes to report. The faces of CAARI have changed. Vathoulla Moustoukki, for forty years the very heart and core of the Institute, has retired. Our headline article is a tribute and testimony to her by Dr. Stuart Swiny, the Director who worked longest with her. She promises to remain a CAARI presence. But her retirement marks a change that we will all feel keenly. Vathoulla’s position of Administrator will be filled by Katerina Mavromichalou, well known already from her years as CAARI’s librarian. We are glad to retain her warmth and insight. Katerina’s role of librarian will be assumed by Anthoulla Vassiliades, a Cypriot from Australia. We will write about Katerina and Anthoulla in the next news-flash, but this one is devoted to Vathoulla the Incomparable.
Vathoulla Moustoukki
An Appreciation

Professor Stuart Swiny

Vathoulla typing object cards for the Sotira-Kaminoudhia excavation. Episkopi Village, 1983
(Note the Late Bronze Age pithos from Episkopi-Bamboula behind)
One of the great pleasures of my fifteen-year directorship of CAARI was working with somebody I could implicitly trust. Not only could I trust Vathoulla, but I knew that she would always have the Institute’s best interests at heart.

When we first met Vathoulla was little more than a receptionist who would on occasion type a letter and who would hold the fort when the director was out running errands on his bicycle. In those days CAARI had no vehicle, no computer of course, no fax, no climate control of any sort—it was indeed a different world. From the beginning I would like to think that we formed rather a good team and I soon realized that she relished a challenge, and in those early days there were many. 
 
As I got to know CAARI’s Secretary I got to know her family too, and she mine, as that is the way things work best in Cyprus. Vathoulla comes from Eylenja or Aglantzia, once a village on the southeastern outskirts of Nicosia and her parents soon welcomed Laina and me—as well as Philip and Alessandra our children—and other CAARI residents on periodic feast days to enjoy their hospitality. Her father Michalis was a “voskos” –or shepherd, as was his father before him–a man of the land and few words, and her mother “Kyria Anna” was a quintessential mother figure with her rabbits and chickens and her forest of potted plants; she was also a wonderful cook. To many, visiting their house was an introduction like no other to traditional Cypriot life.

Before long Vathoulla was helping the few residents at our 41 King Paul Street premises in many ways, far in excess of her secretary’s brief. With an excellent memory for names and a typical Cypriot interest in the details of a person’s background, she soon had a number of far-flung archaeological and academic acquaintances which over the years developed into friendships. When in 2004 a special event was planned in her honor at the ASOR Annual Meeting, I was able with ease to raise sufficient funds to cover her trip, with some to spare. At that meeting I made the following remark: “CAARI directors come and go, but Vathoulla remains.” It is no exaggeration to state that for more than a generation Vathoulla has embodied the very spirit of CAARI: welcoming, helpful and the source of much valuable and reliable information. She knew the library well, having seen it grow from a handful of books to what it is today. In my opinion, a tangible degree of CAARI’s success as an ASOR Overseas School has been due to Vathoulla’s presence, character and love for the institution.
Vathoulla was a consummate hostess and never happier than when arranging for and later consuming chocolate cake and coffee in CAARI’s foyer to celebrate some worthy event. She was also a great sport with a sense of adventure and would set her heart good-humoredly to anything for CAARI’s sake, such as excavating—as she did with me on several occasions over the years—or hefting furniture into the new Andreas Demetriou premises, or again taking on the rôle of a midwife for the 1995 Nicosia European Cultural Month events staged at the Institute. Her unwavering fealty to the Institute through the tenure of eight CAARI and nine Department of Antiquities directors is a remarkable feat and in that, if nothing else, she should take great satisfaction. Surely with the passage of time the names of the successive directors will fade, but the fond memories of Vathoulla Moustoukki will live on. Indeed, she has much to be proud of. She should also be gratified by the number of times fellow Cypriots and members of the Department of Antiquities telephoned her for information on a variety of different subjects. 
I wish her well in her retirement knowing that she has, over a span of four decades, given so much to so many; a legacy unlikely ever to be equaled. But we all know that nobody is irreplaceable, and although Vathoulla’s departure will be keenly felt, in Cyprus and beyond, now is a chance to look from a new perspective at the position she held so steadily. I wish Katerina Mavromichalou all the best and will follow her progress with interest.

Message from CAARI’s Director
 
Dear friends and supporters of CAARI,
2021 began for us here in Cyprus with a second lockdown and a very cold winter. Slowly the restrictions are easing and the warmth is returning but we’ve still got a long way to go. Planning travel or meetings remains uncertain so we’ll continue, for now, to hold our lectures and other events online. The important event that we will not plan until we know for sure it will be a worthy tribute is Vathoulla’s retirement party!

Below you will read an insightful account by CAARI Vice President Annemarie Weyl Carr of the January instalment of our recent conference, held in collaboration with the British Museum. We’ve hosted four online sessions, totalling 29 papers and including contributions from the Department of Antiquities and the University of Cyprus, as well as academics from Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, Greece, Scotland, England and the US. We’re thrilled with the result and now more than 300 people have either joined us live on zoom or caught up with the papers on YouTube. This is a much more substantial audience than the 80 or so people we can squeeze into the CAARI library and we’re glad to have been able to share this exciting research so widely. The next step is to hold a closed online workshop for participants in April to give feedback on each other’s papers and to see if researchers in different parts of the world are able to assist each other with difficult to obtain archival material, as many still cannot travel to complete their research. Over the summer we will decide if it is feasible to hold a live event in Cyprus in November or whether we will move straight to publication.

Very few excavation teams or researchers will make it here this summer and, again, we’ve had to cancel the CAARI annual summer archaeological workshop. Therefore, as an alternative we will be inviting excavators and researchers to contribute to a podcast series hosted by the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation. This will be a challenge, asking participants to bring their experience with Cypriot archaeology to life (whether excavation, material culture or any aspect of research into the past) to a general audience in 15 minutes using only sound, instead of our usual reliance on imagery. We will be launching this very soon so please keep your eyes (and ears) out!

Our next online lecture is coming up on Thursday 11th March. Dr Andrew Sneddon, Director, Extent Heritage Pty Ltd and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, La Trobe University will be presenting on: New Research at the Middle Bronze Age site of Alambra. It will be held at 1pm Cyprus time, given the time difference from Australia, and you can find the registration link on our website:  http://caari.org/programs/.

Finally, I leave you with news of a venue to add to your itinerary for when you are able to visit Cyprus again. The refurbished Paphos District Museum is open and is absolutely wonderful! I’m particularly thrilled to see objects that I excavated at Souskiou-Laona and Kissonerga-Skalia actually on display, as you can perhaps tell from this photo.
Wishing all of our friends good health and that we see you here before too long,
Lindy Crewe, PhD
Director, CAARI
Empire and Excavation: Reflections on an Adventure on YouTube

Professor Annemarie Weyl Carr
On January 29 and 30, CAARI held the second half of its four-day conference sponsored together with the British Museum on Empire and Excavation: Critical Perspectives on Archaeology in British-period Cyprus, 1878-1960. Like the first two days, these were shared by Zoom around the globe as they happened, and the papers are now on You Tube. Have you explored what awaits you there? The URL is https://www.youtube.com/c/CAARICyprus.

The themes are rich. What prompted the arrival of empire? Antiquities were among the benefits that Britain expected from political control of Cyprus, but empire had already been syphoning artifacts Europe-ward by other means: diplomats—French, Italian, British, American—had long threaded political with cultural give-and-take [Maillard]; birds [Merrillees] and bugs [Soldi] had drawn scientific minds, who acquired artifacts and grasped the need to control data collected in Cyprus; the prince’s personal interest thrust Sweden into archaeological overdrive [Göransson]; mining brought industry and the Americans into the picture [Kassianidou]. Archaeology evolved from all these avenues. When professional engagement came, it brought scale but not necessarily order. The archival research foregrounded in the conference’s papers shows how vague the recording of finds and distribution of spoils could be [Papadopoulos]; how constrained even careful publication could be [Leriou/Vavouranakis]; how inadequate storage of materials could hamper research [Göransson]; how imperial habit could erode professional relationships—even by a scholar whose name is worn at CAARI [Papasavvas]. Especially interesting is Kiely’s question of who the workers were who fueled the archaeology of empire. Kiely’s photographic evidence of dig teams finds resonance in Kassianidou’s glimpses of artifacts seeping from villagers to engineers in the mines, or in the domineering treatment of the Armenian consultant to the British Museum [Reeve]. The young archaeologists who wrote in last August’s news-flash all raised concerns about archaeologists’ relation to the local residents with whom they worked. It is a concern that needs a history, and Kiely’s paper invites its study.

If empire and acquisition is one concern, empire and transmission is another, watching the appropriations of empire go on to lives in Britain’s own, its colonies’, and their colonies’ cultures. The tyranny of taste in art historical judgment [Olien], the distorting mirror of cultural appropriation [Morris/Papantoniou], and the ripple-effect of ideologically weighted imagery being uncritically reused [Roditou] are examined in papers that speak clearly to our current anxieties about cultural perception. Significant inquiry focuses on the museum as a medium for the contextualization of imperial appropriations. The use of the Cyprus pavilion as a venue for Britain’s own self-presentation as a colonial power in the Empire of Britain exhibition of 1925 [Reeve]; the decision in 1998 of the American college named for Harvey S. Mudd, founder of the Cyprus Mines Corporation, to return his rich collection of artifacts to Cyprus [Kassianidou]; and the passionate interest of the Egyptian Museum in Swansea, Wales, in contextualizing the Cypriot artifacts brought by colonial pathways into its custody [Hussein] all open insights into the role of museums in creating a place for elements integrated into “our” culture though displaced from their own. Especially telling in this respect is Barker’s paper juxtaposing Australians’ radically different archaeological treatment of ancient Cypriot artifacts on the one hand and equally ancient Aboriginal artifacts on the other. The deeply layered relation of culture in Australia to the colonial experience—some elements absorbed with colonization, others resisted as colonial, still others rejected as pre-colonial—is very relevant to America. No American counterpart to Barker’s reflective overview of Australia is included in the conference, but we, too, are colonies become colonizers with massively appropriative cultures that include far more Cypriot material than has ever been given due attention.

All of this sits at your fingertips on YouTube. It’s is a new kind of gift from CAARI, and well worth making a new habit. 
New Book Brings 3D Technology to Ancient Cypriot Sculptures

Professor Derek B. Counts
Professor Erin W. Averett
The authors in the AAP apotheke (Athienou)
We are excited to announce to our CAARI friends the publication of Visualizing Votive Practice: Exploring Limestone and Terracotta Sculpture from Athienou-Malloura through 3D Models by Derek B. Counts, Erin Walcek Averett, Kevin Garstki, and Michael Toumazou. The book is available as a free, open access, download, published by the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. Visualizing Votive Practice uses 3D images embedded directly in the PDF to present a significant new group of terracotta and limestone sculpture from the sanctuary of Malloura on Cyprus. By combining traditional features of an archaeological artifact catalogue with the dynamic possibilities of a digital book, these fascinating objects come alive on the page. The book also includes hundreds of hyperlinks that invite the reader to engage with comparable objects housed in greatest museums worldwide, explore previous scholarship, and engage the content in new ways.
Structured-light scanning set-up in the Kallinikeio Municipal Museum of Athienou
Visualizing Votive Practice also provides an important discussion of the theory, methods, and practices that produce 3D images in archaeology. The equipment is shown just above. Chapters on the archaeology of the site, the historiography of Cypriot sculpture, and perspectives on the history of archaeological visualization provide context for a catalogue of fifty representative examples of votive limestone and terracotta sculpture from the sanctuary. Each entry features a 3D image embedded directly in the PDF, which can be manipulated and measured.
Visualizing Votive Practice also provides an important discussion of the theory, methods, and practices that produce 3D images in archaeology. The equipment is shown just above. Chapters on the archaeology of the site, the historiography of Cypriot sculpture, and perspectives on the history of archaeological visualization provide context for a catalogue of fifty representative examples of votive limestone and terracotta sculpture from the sanctuary. Each entry features a 3D image embedded directly in the PDF, which can be manipulated and measured. The objects are also linked to Open Context where every artifact receives a catalogue entry with a stable URI and a high-resolution 3D model that can be viewed, manipulated, and downloaded. Additionally, each entry links to the Athienou Archaeological Project’s Sketchfab collection, which offers perhaps the best photorealistic visualization for each model with annotations. Leveraging the power of Linked Open Data, the book also includes links to PeriodO, Pleiades, ASOR’s Levantine Ceramics Project, the Getty Vocabularies, and comparanda at leading museums allowing the reader to use the book to engage the world beyond the page. Moreover, the mirror publication of the catalogue with Alexandria Archive's Open Context digital publishing platform enables future researchers to link to specific artifacts and for the catalogue to expand and develop in the future.

With Visualizing Votive Practice we wanted to challenge traditional approaches to publication and leverage open, digital entry points to provide better access to our research, but also connect that research with a wider network of information. The book builds upon the available platforms for sharing 3D models and combines them with important archaeological context that makes them more than just “pretty” models on a computer screen. Our models are grounded in their archaeological contexts, with full publication of their associated metadata, making them powerful research tools. We are especially pleased to shed new light on the important sanctuary of Athienou-Malloura in the Mesaoria plain, which as one of a relatively small number of religious sites to be excavated scientifically provides a wealth of information on changing Cypriot religious practices from the Cypro-Geometric through Roman periods (ca. 8th c. BCE to at least the 4th c. CE).

Bill Caraher, the director of the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, remarks: "Open access books such as Visualizing Votive Practice show the potential to combine rigorous peer review and innovative collaborative publishing practices. Scholar-led publishing is not the only future for academic publishing, but works such as this are starting to make the case for it being a viable and significant alternative to traditional academic and commercial publishers."

We hope that Visualizing Votive Practice contributes to the dynamic field of Cypriot archaeology and to the exciting experiments in archaeological publication. This collaborative project not only brings together different areas of research expertise, but also works with nonprofit digital repositories and institutions with missions that promote ethical and open engagement with archaeological materials. 
 
Looking Ahead from COVID-19
The wide dissemination of COVID-19 vaccines is promising a return of in-person meetings, unmasked faces, and unconstricted travel. We can hardly wait. Though CAARI is still planning all future events virtually, fellowships have been awarded for academic year 2021-22 and we look forward to having library and residence full and busy. The serious challenges that the pandemic has brought us have made us all the more aware of the importance of every one of our friends and supporters. Over the year, many of you have risen to help us. Our heart-felt thanks go out to every one of you who reached out with a gift of support this year. We are very grateful! We will still be sending pleas: our needs have only grown as the months of the pandemic have worn on. The link to make a gift is right here, and very much alive. But today, this is not the main message.
Today, our message is one of thanks! To all who help CAARI sustain our keen, vigorous work: thank you, thank you for your generous participation!