• 1 Shackel 2013, pp. 317-318.

2In Mediterranean prehistory, primarily throughout the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE, labour organisation is commonly addressed as the driving force behind social differentiation, technological innovation, and intensification of economic production; a perspective rooted in post-industrial frameworks analysing the social organisation and the living conditions of the workforce post-18th century CE.1 In prehistoric archaeological contexts, this approach is often applied as a proxy to addressing social organisation in contexts of craft specialisation, long-distance trade, and social stratification. However, the application of these post-industrial frameworks to pre-modern, and especially prehistoric societies, entails significant conceptual challenges in defining the structural variables of labour and its organisation.

• 2 Costin, Hagstrum 1995, pp. 620-624.
• 3 Bombardieri 2013, pp. 92-94.
• 4 Arendt 1958.

3While the study of the spatial logic of economic and social differentiation has become a staple of most archaeological projects, particularly in domestic and settlement-bound settings, specific assessments of the chaîne opératoire of distinct economic activities, like metallurgy, agricultural or pottery production look at sourcing techniques and locales within the landscape to determine how communities chose and worked the raw materials employed in their craft.2 This paper aims to push these approaches further, showing how interrogating intertwined labour in Bronze Age landscapes as both politically-productive action and embodied affect better charts the relationship between metallurgy, agriculture, and social change. It introduces productive current concepts around different kinds of workplace,3 while arguing for further reflection around the concept of work in this discourse and its relationship with the related ideas of labour and action. Drawing on Arendt’s theorisation of these terms,4 it reappraises several lines of direct archaeological evidence and ethnohistoric and ethnoarchaeological comparanda for seasonality in agro-pastoral and metallurgical landscapes. By attending to the qualities of seasonal mobility and informal work as action and affect, it offers some first steps towards characterising the landscape of labour organisation of the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC rural Cyprus in a denaturalised, politically vital light.

• 5 Webb 2013, pp. 140-141; Andreou 2019b, pp. 292-296.

4The Cypriot Bronze Age, conventionally spanning the mid-3rd and 2nd millennia BCE, hosts a key shift in prehistoric economic and technological developments. Towards the mid-2nd millennium BCE, metallurgical and agricultural labour – by definition a connecting point between settlements and their surrounding landscapes –, become more widespread. Though heterogeneously, the exploitation of raw materials generally intensifies, craft is increasingly specialised and standardised amidst the connectivity explosion of long-distance trade networks.5

• 6 Düring et al. 2021, pp. 670-672.
• 7 Sherratt 1972, pp. 489-504.

5Though not unique to Cyprus, it is particularly interesting to analyse how this scenario plays out on the island particularly around the organisation of metallurgical and agricultural labour, often addressed as the most prominent drivers for social complexity and territorial organisation. Cypriot copper was widely referenced in ancient sources throughout the Mediterranean as one of the main production sources from the 19th century BCE until late antiquity. This status inspired numerous studies on the spatial control of mining and metallurgical resources that centred top-down and elite-controlled organisation of its production throughout the Bronze Age, despite the origins of metallurgical activity being pushed back into the 3rd millennium BCE.6 But mining and metallurgical labour are only one branch of the biforked traditional narrative around the “path to social complexity”: the spatial conditions of settlement organisation and resource control of the 2nd millennium BCE also centre agricultural production and other subsistence strategies within the tendency towards economic growth.7

• 8 Vita-Finzi et al. 1970.
• 9 Keswani 1993, pp. 76-79; Knapp 2013, pp. 22-35.

6Within these strategies, resource proximity and availability to a given settlement have been examined through a somewhat deterministic lens that recurrently relates opportunity and possibility to inevitable action, and vice versa. This approach, inspired by the widely critiqued model of Site Catchment Areas,8 effectively erases the political and environmental agency of rural and hinterland communities by severely limiting the consideration of labour-based mobility and community connectivity. It favours a small-scale, settlement-specific territorial and economic characterisation of sites where, particularly in the hinterland and the Troodos foothills, communities were portrayed as isolated and subsistence-based, tasked with one main activity: either agricultural production, in agro-pastoral mixed systems; or metallurgical production supported by satellite, agricultural villages.9

• 10 Webb 2018, pp. 10-13; Andreou 2019a, pp. 166-168.
• 11 Andreou 2019a, pp. 171-174; Webb, Knapp 2021, pp. 216-218; Ioannides, Kassianidou, Papasavvas 2024, (...)

7The spatial organisation of settlement patterns throughout the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE shows a broad tendency towards increasing nucleation, more permanent occupation, and growth in size and population, generally attesting to a gradual increase in the connectivity and diversification of economic production and exchange towards the 13th century BCE. During the Early and Middle Cypriot periods, the communities throughout the foothills and southern half of Mesaoria exhibit clear autonomous agency over their economic landscape, remaining intensely connected and mobile within it.10 By the Late Cypriot, a key shift in socioeconomic dynamics results in a noticeable intensification of production, increasingly centralised around coastal, urban sites like Enkomi and Kition. Although emerging urban elites uphold increasing control over industrial logistics across the coast, the rural communities in the hinterland arguably retained a significant degree of autonomy and economic agency that were structural to upending this economic growth.11

• 14 Bombardieri 2013, p. 92.

10In a comparative assessment of the structural space of craft-production between Erimi Laonin tou Porakou and other Early and Middle Cypriot sites, Bombardieri14 offered a methodological framework to assess the organisation of labour practices within industrial and productive settlements. He underscored the need to evaluate the variables of place, time, and specific tasks as discernible variables within the archaeological record. As part of this analysis, he proposed two types of workspaces, each associated with socially distinct spatial-temporal experiences of work (the workplace), that were sanctioned through habitus.

• 15 North 1990, pp. 57-58; Milonakis, Fine 2007, pp. 32-37; Bombardieri 2013, pp. 92-93.
• 16 Shanks, Tilley 1987, pp. 189-192.

11Bombardieri’s distinction between formal and informal workplaces is an extremely useful analytical tool, particularly in its potential to address the experiential character of the workplace within the social organisation of the community. However, caution is warranted when applying this framework to prehistoric economic systems. It draws on Douglass North’s approach to political, social, and economic institutions, and which has been criticised for its deterministic emphasis of a market-oriented rationality, an individualistic approach to agency, and the limited evidence supporting its applicability in pre-modern societies.15 While these critiques do not undermine the methodological value of Bombardieri’s proposal, they highlight the aforementioned dialectical tension between its analytical framework and broader theoretical debates. These include binary and mutually exclusive distinctions between categories such as leisure and work, or between social and economic production.16 Such binary distinctions are recurring themes in the study of ancient economics and often more dependent on theoretical orientation rather than methodological suitability.

• 17 Childe 1962, pp. 13-19, 80-81; Shanks, Tilley 1987, pp. 189-198.
• 18 Andreou 2019a, pp. 162-165.
• 19 Blake 2004, pp. 233-236.
• 20 Lefebvre 1991, pp. 38-40; Tilley 2016, pp. 36-40.
• 21 Polanyi 1944, pp. 48-50, 136-137.
• 22 Bourdieu 1977, pp. 42-65 ; Bourdieu 1990, pp. 52-98.

12The discussion of the formality and informality of the workspace has been a central theme in archaeological and economic scholarship from the outset. Childe’s Urban Revolution, or Shanks and Tilley’s spatial formalisation of the work experience are formative ideas in assessing labour specialisation and power dynamics within the built environment.17 The discussion of formality and informality in the social organisation of economic production (fig. 1), echoing the tension between formalist and substantivist approaches,18 became a central tenet of the Spatial Turn,19 which brought about a plethora of frameworks to analyse the relationship between power imbalances in the production and reproduction of the social space.20 Polanyi and Bourdieu substantially impacted archaeological interpretations of social and productive spaces, contesting the formality of labour in market-economies in lieu of embedded, informal economic systems,21 as well as by introducing concepts like habitus and field to analysing agency and practice in different socioeconomic contexts.22

• 23 Polanyi 1944, pp. 46-48; Ingold 2000, pp. 79-81.
• 24 Andreou 2019a, p. 162.

13Polanyian approaches to pre-modern economics posit an anthropologically grounded and material-based understanding of the social conditions of labour organisation. Despite predating Ingold’s work on landscape and dwelling, Polanyi’s idea of embeddedness articulates with Ingold’s approach to a relational, immersive experience of the environment through social action.23 The notion of embeddedness proposes that pre-modern economies are embedded in the more general sociocultural fabric of intra- and inter-community relationality, rather than being structured around autonomous market-driven systems. This idea is foundational to the multi-scalar, bottom-up perspectives on rural cooperativism24 that place collective action and relationality at the centre of social – and spatial – organisation, and therefore, of labour and economic organisation too. It considers local and regional social networks as a precondition for economic activity, not the converse; and in doing so it highlights the spatial and temporal qualities of agency, defining a type of sociality that permeates the formal and bureaucratic divisions of larger-scale political and administrative systems.

• 25 Arendt 1958.

15Unexplored until now, I argue that archaeology has much to gain from Hannah Arendt’s ideas on action, work, and labour,25 especially on how they relate to power and praxis, and as essentially enmeshed within the landscape.

• 26 See “Zweckrational” in Weber 1978, pp. 3-62.

18Despite its usefulness and integrability with other proposals, Arendt’s approach maintains a central anthropocentric view of the human-environmental relationship. The anthropocentric bias has been consubstantial with economic and territorial analyses and narratives around the birth of inequality for decades. Naturalising the capitalist logic of careless resource exploitation, commodification and extractivism in pre-modern economies, anthropocentrism overly emphasises the economic logic of instrumental rationality,26 championing ideas of human dominion over the environment, advocating for a universal, rational pull towards optimisation and maximisation of profits, and ignoring the enduring affective relations between humans and other non-human agents.

• 27 Van Oyen 2016, pp. 371-374.
• 28 Given 2013, pp. 8-18; Given 2020, pp. 451-455; Robb 2013, pp. 661-662.

19In the past decades, increased attention towards expanded notions of agency and the affective, relational networks27 they engender, has driven research agendas towards portraying a more holistic and materially oriented archaeological landscape of action,28 profoundly imbued with diverse environmental rhythms and agencies.

• 29 Harris 2016, pp. 206-207; Cipolla, Crellin, Harris 2021, pp. 6-8; Haughton 2024.
• 30 Overton, Hamilakis 2013; Overton 2018; Barua 2019.
• 31 Navaro-Yashin 2009, pp. 4-5; Hamilakis 2017, pp. 172-173.

20Posthumanist and new materialist approaches have spearheaded these proposals, where non-human agents are an indissociable part of the social landscape.29 Through a fundamental rejection of individuality and anthropocentrism, I argue that, despite fair critiques, these approaches hold immense potential for assessing the role of action as collective agency beyond the human. Therefore, considering animal, vegetable, environmental or geophysical agencies in the context of embedded economies30 helps examine the variables of time, space and tasks, in a broader, fundamentally complex and inter-dependent environmental framework where affect31 embodies the informal dynamics by which agents, materials, and spaces co-produce social meaning, experience, and change.

• 32 Chesson et al. 2019, pp. 37-41.
• 33 Ingold 1993, pp. 153-164; Wenger 2007, pp. 72-84.

22Chesson et al. define their labourscape as a way of conceptualizing how labor practices are embedded within and shape the landscape.32 Farming, mining, construction, and craft production are activities that leave both material and symbolic traces on the world. They relate different labour practices to culturally negotiated decisions and values, like terraces or irrigation systems as indicators of community cooperativism. The physical traces of these practices comport the materialisation of social relationships alongside power negotiation and ideology. Chesson et al.’s formulation of the labourscape combines Ingold’s taskscape approach with Wenger’s idea of Communities of Practice.33 Despite being formulated for the post-industrial landscape of Calabria, it offers a sound methodological and integrative approach based on collective and embedded understandings of human-environmental relationality, applicable to the rural landscapes of Bronze Age Cyprus.

• 34 Deleuze, Guattari 1987, pp. 9-10, 351-424.

23The labourscape approach I propose (fig. 2) incorporates a posthumanist angle to conceptualizing the diversity of economic agents within the foothills’ communities through affective practice in accordance with the notion of deterritorialisation.34 A deterritorialised labourscape is one where the relationships between the agencies that constitute it are fundamentally non-static, breaking apart, shifting, and being reconstituted at different times and places, encapsulating the informality and complexity of multi-scalar, embedded economies in a non-anthropocentric, relational and diachronical way.

• 35 Knapp, Kassianidou, Donnelly 2008; Falconer et al. 2010; Steel 2016; Ridder et al. 2017, pp. 515-52 (...)

24There are good precedents for similar analyses in the Cypriot Bronze Age (fig. 3) that emphasise key aspects of a labourscape. Ingold’s idea of the taskscape has been relatively common and successful in its goal: assessing the physical indicators of the chaîne opératoire of distinct economic activities, attending to their mechanical organization (time) and task-specific placement (space). Studies on settlements like Aredhiou Vouppes, Politiko Phorades or Politiko Troullia contribute significant insights into how rural communities related to their environment and negotiated their socio-spatial organisation.35

• 36 Wenger 2007, pp. 122-131.
• 37 Given 2020, pp. 459-460, 463-465.
• 38 Bombardieri, Muti 2018, pp. 25-27, 33-35.
• 39 Tyrrell Stewart 2007; Porta, Cannavò 2024, p. 249; Webb 2024, p. 102.
• 40 Frankel, Webb 2006, pp. 299-300; Knapp 2023, pp. 1307-1315.
• 41 Crewe, Hill 2012, pp. 207-212.

25Meanwhile, commonly around studies of craft-production, the notion of Communities of Practice is useful to assessing labour, work, and action, emphasizing the social transmission and transformation of practice.36 This notion presents an especially valuable perspective for labourscapes that connected both formal and informal work, either in sequential locations through labour-based mobility (e.g. community and intercommunity labour pooling at seasonal peaks),37 as well as within the same locale, facilitating intergenerational and intercommunity situated learning and reproduction38 (e.g. apprenticeships, seasonal and “transnational” labour migration, or even itinerant specialized artisans and workers).39 Relatedly, studies based on Bourdieu’s habitus address similar notions of how technological innovations and adaptations are shared and negotiated,40 underscoring the role of community-based socialisation through work.41 The evidence in these studies situates specific tasks in the chaîne opératoire of rural labour, particularly within metallurgical and agricultural communities, highlighting their mechanical, ordinal organisation.

• 42 Ollinaho 2023, pp. 418-425.

26However, a central element of the labourscape approach to addressing how environmental agents and rhythms relate to economic practices is seldomly elaborated on: seasonality. In bringing together a concern for time-space organisation (as explored in Ingoldian approaches) with an examination of the habituating, community-producing effects of labour (as analysed in studies that integrate Communities of Practice and Bourdieusian approaches), seasonality in fact represents a key element for understanding Bronze Age labour organisation as affective, politically-constructive and more-than-human action, in contrast to theoretical-methodological frameworks that engage with prehistoric labour and economy as isolated, depragmatised42 and instrumentalist grists. While a comprehensive study is beyond the scope of this paper, this section presents two key lines of evidence that begin to characterise the seasonal structure of Bronze Age labourscapes: ethnohistorical and ethnoarchaeological comparisons that suggest, in broad outline, potential dynamics in Mediterranean landscapes; and direct archaeological evidence for seasonal mobility and season-specific task structuring in Bronze Age rural sites.

• 43 Manning 2019, pp. 99-101; Lucas, Fuller 2020, pp. 234-243.

27Most labour practices in agropastoral economies are inherently tied to the seasonal rhythms and life cycles of plants, animals, and climatic variables, like precipitation and temperature. Aspects such as the elevation/lowering of the water table or the raise/descent of freeze lines, crucially affect access to resources in more sedentary, agriculturally reliant societies. As a multi-scalar phenomenon, seasonal variability (annual and inter-annual) holds indisputable relevance in the organization of socioeconomic practices.43 This aspect is crucial to understand seasonality not simply as a temporal variable of rhythm and duration, but as a necessary argument in favour of highly adaptable and diversified economic systems. Complementing agriculture with foraging, farming, and hunting, among other activities, is part of a technological and practical adaptation to negotiating and mitigating risk.

• 44 Given 2020, pp. 464-465.
• 45 Ibid., pp. 458-459.

28As an embedded feature of the social and spatial organisation of the landscape, seasonality is also inherently cultural. The early modern and contemporary organisation of rural labour in the northwestern foothills exemplifies how the mobility and relationality of Cypriot communities between the mountains and the plain is seasonally sanctioned.44 Satellite settlements like Mandres were intermittently occupied at different times of the year by people from several villages in the Troodos to work their fields on the plain. They would visit Mandres for different periods at different times of the year, frequently returning to their villages within the day for purposes like grain storage.45 M. Given cautions against conceiving seasonality as a purely environmental constraint, advocating instead for its role as a socially and culturally negotiated phenomenon. Through community rituals, festivals, harvesting or farming fairs, seasonal mobility and community interaction organised around work are a fundamental mechanism for social reproduction and cohesion.

• 46 Brysbaert 2020, pp. 66-75; Brysbaert, Vikatou 2022, pp. 66-68.
• 47 Knapp 2003, pp. 569-571; Knapp 2023, pp. 1316-1318; Kassianidou 2013, pp. 39-40.

31The archaeological relevance of seasonal scheduling has been primarily predicated on the environmental variability of resource availability and climatic-geographic constraints. But seasonality is not limited to agropastoral and farming practices. Throughout the northern Troodos foothills, at their intersection with the plain of Mesaoria lies one of the most prominent areas for copper ore outcrops, timber sources and fertile land in fields and terraces (fig. 4). Cross-craft interaction46 is one of the most salient, yet rarely explored features of prehistoric informal economies, and a key aspect of this proposal. Several assessments on the organisation of metallurgical labour in Bronze Age Cyprus (from prospecting to mining and smelting practices), have pointed out the likelihood of different tasks being inherently seasonal, as an integral part of economic pluriactivity.47

• 48 Hein, Kilikoglou, Kassianidou 2007, pp. 143-148.
• 49 Falconer, Fall 2013, pp. 125-129.

32The material instances relating to the seasonality and informality of these cross-craft interactions reveal a complex network of recurrent short and middle-distance mobility connecting the surrounding taskscapes of forestry, ceramic or stone tool production, to more localised metallurgical and agricultural workplaces. This is evidenced, for example, in the metallurgical ceramic assemblage of Politiko Phorades,48 where the use of local clay deposits for the manufacture of tuyeres and furnaces, coupled with the lack of habitation infrastructures, suggests a workforce who visited the area for short periods, yet engaged in a variety of interacting productive activities (clay extraction, ceramic and furnace-making, metallurgy). Similarly, in the pyrotechnological strategies at Politiko Troullia,49 the combination of orchard-type arboriculture and woodland taxa in metallurgical fuel regimes, support the presence of highly – yet variably – mobile and topographically distributed taskscapes for different scales of economic mobility.

• 50 Webb 2015, pp. 33-34; Kassianidou 2018, pp. 349-351.

33The juxtaposition of the chaîne opératoire of metallurgical tasks with those of agro-pastoral nature, among others, is further emphasised by indicators such as the groundstone assemblages at Ambelikou Aletri and Apliki Karamallos. In both instances, the assemblages reflected varying degrees of techno-tasking versatility and reuse, relating to their communities’ involvement in both metallurgical and other subsistence practices, and grounding the idea of a seasonally diversified economy on the northern Troodos foothills throughout the Bronze Age.50

• 51 Coleman 2003; McCartney 2013.

35Beyond excavated evidence, survey projects have also contributed to shedding light on the spatial-temporal integration of metallurgical and agricultural practices. Regional projects like the TAESP and SCSP51 identified several instances of ad-hoc beneficiation of both local (jade, jasper, calcedony) and non-local (Lefkara) chert in the context of agricultural tasks within prehistoric assemblages around the westernmost mining districts of the northern foothills. The in-situ working of Lefkara chert (outcropping further east and inland than the sites within the TAESP survey area [fig. 4]), evidenced by documented concentrations of knapping debris, suggests the deliberate transportation of non-locally sourced chert to be worked on a need-basis at different locations. The spatial conditions of this material assemblage ground the possibility of an embedded, diversified and seasonally connected labourscape throughout the foothills for the Bronze Age, as it specifically binds material mobility and itinerancy with labour-based activities.

• 52 Tyrrell Stewart 2007, pp. 328-330.

36Further east along the foothills, around Idalion, the ISP, – a smaller project within the CPSP,52 conducted interviews with local athkiakadhes (professional flint knappers), who reported key information about their material preference and practices around the Lefkara chert, which is documented in the area since the Chalcolithic. The reporting by the ISP integrated specific ethnoarchaeological perspectives with interviews on local professional knappers to guide their research sourcing and transporting practices of Lefkara cores. The informants reported a manifestly affective preference for the Lefkara chert and its physical qualities that overhauled traditional instrumentalist rationale by prioritising material choice over availability of nearby sources; they related frequent, middle-range trips into outcropping locations for sourcing, and later transportation of the cores into both near and distant fields, as well as threshing floors. They would move and travel with the intact cores that they would then work ad-hoc, on a need-basis.

• 53 Halstead, O’Shea 1989, pp. 3-4; Marston 2011, pp. 191-194; Tyrrell Stewart 2016, pp. 85-95; Webb 20 (...)

39While ethnographic evidence is employed here as an analytical tool rather than a direct analogy, its incorporation into commonly applied spatial analytical approaches – such as Social Network Analyses, Site Catchment Areas, Least Cost Paths or Central Place Theory –, enhances their potential to account for qualitative and practical differences in the economic rationale of pre-modern societies. By bridging the gap between spatial analytical methods and theoretical social methodologies, ethnographic parallels enable a location and culturally specific revaluation of different approaches to mobility modelling. Considering the examples outlined above, it follows that prehistoric mobility across the labourscape should arguably be conceptualised as much more extensive and lengthier than conventionally theorised, as greater distances and times comport more diversified procurement areas and increase ecological and seasonal diversity as well as social connectivity, central to risk management and social resilience.53

• 54 Knapp, Kassianidou, Donnelly 2008, pp. 205-208.
• 55 (Ridder et al., 2017).

41The archaeological examples presented here, though not exhaustive due to scope and length constraints, provide a nuanced grounding for how the labourscape framework can integrate multiple scales and dimensions of analysis in the temporal and spatial characterisation of distinct labour practices. Material assemblages like the seasonally lined slag dumps in the creeks associated with copper smelting at Politiko Phorades,54 or the gaming stones found at the agricultural terraces of Politiko Troullia,55 suggest a more flexible characterisation of the spatial and temporal character of Bronze Age workplaces, highlighting their inherent informality and the social aspect of work and action, as well as appraising the centrality of unspecialised – not unskilled – labour as an integral part of the diversified, embedded economy of Bronze Age Cyprus.