From the Editors

Architectural and stylistic analysis, conservation activities, archival research, and archaeometry are, as most archaeologists in our region would enthusiastically agree, essential for interpreting and preserving the past. There has been a tendency to consider the work of active surveyors and excavators more entertaining than that of experts who comb through manuscripts, examine artifacts under a microscope, or meticulously assess damage to historic buildings. Nevertheless, the latter kind of research is becoming much more important in the light of concerns about limiting the excavation of sites and the increasing number of known heritage sites that are endangered and in need of attention. The articles in this issue argue forcefully for the knowledge that can be gained from reexamining existing sites and material culture.

The island harbors of the eastern Mediterranean are justly famous for their picturesque medieval structures. Malta, Rhodes, Corfu, and Crete, among others, offer memorable examples. The less famous but, nonetheless, well-preserved historic buildings of Famagusta, Cyprus, are the subject of Danai Konstantinidou’s article “‘Ruined Cities in Cyprus’: How a Three-Hundred-Word Letter Kick-Started the Preservation of Cyprus’s Medieval Structures.” Built from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, Famagusta’s many significant medieval monuments were in danger of destruction at the beginning of the twentieth century. Konstantinidou traces the events that led up to the somewhat surprising twist of fate for medieval Famagusta. She details how a remarkable anonymous letter to the Times spurred a six-year period of restoration efforts on the part of the British government. Among many insights in this article is the author’s wry observation of how the letter appealed to the British people by blaming the destruction primarily on the “locals,” when in fact much of it was attributable to British occupation. Nonetheless, as the article concludes, this missive “marked the beginning of a process that shaped Cyprus’s medieval monuments as we appreciate them today.”

A second article dedicated to Cyprus, “Hidden Mediterranean History/Histories: The Church of the Panagia tou Potamou in Kazafani (Ozanköy), Cyprus,” by Thomas Kaffenberger, Manuela Studer-Karlen, Michael J. K. Walsh, and Werner Matthias Schmid, details the interdisciplinary methodology the team used to analyze the architecture, history, and wall paintings of a semirural church. Discussing its role in the spiritual life of the sixteenth-century community that worshipped and celebrated life events there, the authors raise several important heritage questions in order to arrive at a set of detailed recommendations for the future preservation of the building and its artwork. As they highlight the religious and other symbolic aspects of the church’s decorative program within the context of the wider region, they also explain its function for the specific community, demonstrating how the analysis of “minor monuments” can be essential to understanding past societies.

Moving from Cyprus to the Judean desert, another team of authors introduces us to the “Cave of the Warrior.” When it was discovered in 1993, it was an important find from the period of the Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age transition in the Levant. A large quantity of grave goods, some of them made of remarkably preserved perishable materials, were found there, as well as numerous other artifacts. The cave was rapidly excavated to protect its contents, and the subsequent reports left room for further examination of its material culture, which the authors here undertake in their article entitled, “Micro-history in Archaeology and Its Contribution to Archaeo-logical Research.” Hai Ashkenazi, Dafna Langgut, Simcha Lev-Yadun, Ehud Weiss, Gila Kahila Bar-Gal, Yuval Goren, and Nili Lipschitz (z”l), to whose memory the article is dedicated, revisit the site and its contents through careful laboratory and field analyses of the buried person’s belongings and their context. The authors demonstrate how a site representing a single event in the life of one individual can contribute to answering larger questions including those about subsistence economy, lifestyle, and demography of a whole period.

In our final article, Yonatan Adler returns to the records of the early twentieth-century excavations of Samaria-Sebaste and proposes a new theory about the buildings found...