461 aDVoCatInG CYproCentrICIsM: an InDIGenoUs MoDeL for the eMerGenCe of state forMatIon on CYprUs MarIa I aCoVoU archaeological research Unit, Department of history and archaeology University of Cyprus nicosia, Cyprus In honor of seymour Gitin and in the name of the challenging and fruitful dialogue we have had for several years, this essay brings together in summary form the results of various attempts on my part to introduce an island-speciic “Cyprocentric” meth- odology for the study of the emergence of state for- mation in ancient Cyprus. thus, it also marks where I stand today in my research on the island’s ancient polities of the Late Bronze and Iron ages. A Macrohistoric Island Perspective My approach has been and remains consistently macrohistoric: it considers the second and irst mil- lennia BC together as one and the same continuum. the evidence provided by the material culture of this longue durée is evaluated together with that of: (a) the contemporary script/s and language/s irst encountered at the inception of the Late Cypriot (LC) period (ca. 1600 BC); (b) evidence provided by literary testimonia, which, with very few excep- tions (e.g., the historiographies of herodotus and Xenophon), were written at a considerably later date (e.g., the irst century BC Bibliotheke Historike of Diodorus siculus), long after the abolition of the last Cypriot states; and (c) cartography as it emerged during the renaissance in europe from the resur- rected study of ancient geography (Iacovou 2001a; 2004a). our understanding of the numerous region-spe- ciic episodes (see Dever 1992: 107–8) that snow- balled into a Mediterranean-wide crisis shortly be- fore the end of the second millennium BC (Ward and Joukowsky 1992) has for a long time been compromised (in the aegean and in Cyprus rather more than in the Levant) by the methodologically different treatment of Late Bronze age and Iron age archaeologies by separate groups of scholars who specialize in one or the other. although it was each region’s individual response to the dissolution of the economy of the Late Bronze age empires and palace states that dictated the conditions of its pas- sage to the irst millennium (Betancourt 2000: 301; Muhly 2003: 24), an all-encompassing factor has long been sought in a generic event: the activity of the sea peoples who, from having been a problem for Merneptah and rameses III (o’Connor 2000), became synonymous in modern scholarship with an invincible multi-ethnic coalition of “sea and land raiders” (Barnett 1990: 366) that attacked any- where and everywhere from the egyptian Delta to palestine (albright 1990: 507); Mycenaean pylos (Chadwick 1976: 178, 192); sinda and enkomi in Cyprus (Dikaios 1969–1971 II: 523, 529); and be- yond (sandars 1978). An artiicial academic device—the sharp distinc- tion between the archaeology of the Bronze age and that of the Iron age (which in Greece is to a large extent synonymous with Classical archaeol- ogy)—has been detrimental, inter alia, to deepen- ing our understanding of the Iron age of Cyprus (Iacovou 2005a). there is a wide hiatus between the Late Cypriot horizon—as most studies tend to stop short of the 12th century or deal supericially (and hence unconvincingly) with the critical LC IIIa–LC IIIB transition (e.g., knapp 1997: 69; steel 2004: 210–13)—and that of the early Iron age, as few scholars address in an interpretative manner the 300-year-long pre-archaic horizon (e.g., reyes 1994), an attitude I have called “Cypro-Geometric