Our understanding of the earliest Iron Age on Cyprus has long remained somewhat obscure. This is the result of both a relative lack of material evidence and the fact that scholarly attention has focused more on the preceding Late Bronze Age and on the subsequent Cypro-Archaic period. As more, and more varied, data have accumulated, there have been calls for a more theoretically informed approach to considering the social changes involved, and even for prehistorians to extend their work into the Cypriot Iron Age. As a response to this, the present study considers a broad range of material and documentary evidence, attempts to reconstruct the political economy, and offers an interpretative framework based on social understandings of Complex Adaptive Systems theory. Using this approach, the authors conclude that, while the enduring realities of Cyprus—its geography, copper resources and long tradition of agropastoralism—continued to shape Cypriot culture, the Iron Age is not simply a continuation of its Bronze Age sociopolitical forms. We argue instead that the earliest Iron Age involved social actors negotiating new politico-economic agendas in response to changing conditions in the Iron Age eastern Mediterranean.

长期以来，我们对塞浦路斯最早的铁器时代的了解仍然有些模糊。这是由于物质证据相对缺乏以及学术界的注意力更多地集中在之前的青铜时代晚期和随后的塞浦路斯-古风时期这一事实造成的。随着越来越多、越来越多样化的数据积累，有人呼吁采用更具理论依据的方法来考虑所涉及的社会变化，甚至要求史前学家将他们的工作延伸到塞浦路斯铁器时代。作为对此的回应，本研究考虑了广泛的物质和文献证据，试图重建政治经济学，并提供基于复杂适应系统理论的社会理解的解释框架。通过这种方法，作者得出的结论是，虽然塞浦路斯持久的现实——其地理、铜资源和悠久的农牧业传统——继续塑造着塞浦路斯文化，但铁器时代不仅仅是青铜器时代社会政治形式的延续。相反，我们认为，最早的铁器时代涉及社会参与者谈判新的政治经济议程，以应对铁器时代地中海东部不断变化的条件。