“Bridging the Gap” focused on five centuries in Cypriot archaeology — between the end of Roman control over the island and its annexation to the Crusader Levant (mid 7th-12th centuries AD) — which are known as the ‘Gap Period’ because of the near-absence of material culture remains and document-sources.
The underlying assumption was that the gap was perceived rather than real, and can be resolved by identifying material culture that had been neglected, or not identified. The particular material culture that was identified as the signature-corpus for the period, was hand-made pottery which appears at the beginning of the period. The primary aim was therefore to create a chronological typology for this corpus, that will help resolve the five ‘lost centuries’. The results could then be used to identify settlement patterns and highlight socio-economic processes through the period, in particular the disintegration and recovery of local and regional production and distribution systems.
Yet the project had implications beyond Cyprus. Gap periods in the archaeological record exist across time and geography throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Often they have material-culture fingerprint similar to the one in Cyprus, as hand-made pottery manufacture replaces centralised workshops mass-producing pottery on the fast wheel, and a new path of development begins. The key role of hand-made pottery — often the only material culture that is found in sites of such crisis periods — has been acknowledged in a few seminal papers over the last two decades, but the challenge of turning this corpus into a research tool has not been taken. The common notion is still that hand-made pottery represents non-specialised manufacture, shows no coherent development, and consequently cannot be used as interpretational tool.
The project therefore had three objectives, all associated with the resolution of gaps in the archaeological record through studies of ceramics. The first one was particular to Cyprus, the other two had impact on the discipline as a whole:
1. to bridge the five-centuries gap in Cypriot archaeology;
A scheme of chronological-development of hand-made pottery through the gap period was established, and can be applied in excavations and survey projects on the island.
2. to establish a methodology for studying gap periods in societies with heavy reliance on pottery;
The methodology that was developed during the project to identify the 'missing' assemblage, and establish stages of chronological-development for it, was phrased as a model that can be applied in comparable cases.
3. to demonstrate the validity of a craft-specialisation model for handmade pottery;
Parameters that are visible in the pottery itself — morphological and technological — and that can be used to identify craft specialisation in hand-made pottery, were identified and applied to the hand-made pottery of the gap period.
