Cyprian Broodbank (UCL) - Archaeology Center Lunch Club: "Beyond Aphrodite: Island Dynamics on Kythira, Greece"

‘No man is an Island, entire of itself' (John Donne). Islands are fascinating places, mostly tiny scraps of land, yet of disproportionate impact on human history, culture and imagination. Their past, and the role that they have played in the deep history and evolution of our planet, has, however, been fundamentally misframed since the Renaissance. Far from being sequestered, fantastical places, most islands, for most of the time, have been places of connection, passage, often indeed the stepping-stones that first began to tie together our planet, starting thousands of years ago. They are implicated, in short, in the origins of globalization, long before the hey-day of Western navigators. Research on the island of Kythira, Greece, illustrates how an interdisciplinary project based around archaeological fieldwork can write an alternative historyone island's past.
Cyprian Broodbank grew up in London, and read History at Oxford. After a Masters at Bristol, he took his PhD at Cambridge, and from 1994 until 2014 was based at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, where he rose to the title of Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology. From October 2014 he moved to Cambridge University as John Disney Professor of Archaeology and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. His first book, An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades (2000) won the Runciman Award and the James R. Wiseman Prize of the Archaeological Institute of America, and his second The Making of the Middle Sea (2013) won last year's Wolfson History Prize. His current research embraces Mediterranean archaeology and history, comparative island archaeology, and archaeology as deep global history. He also co-directs a large-scale landscape archaeology project on the Greek island of Kythira.