Seminar: The Hala Sultan Tekke Hinterland Survey Project: Five Years of Landscape Archaeology in the Larnaca Area, Cyprus

The site complex of Hala Sultan Tekke remains one of the most significant urban centres of the Late Bronze Age in Cyprus. While extensive excavations have illuminated the character of the main settlement, its wider landscape and long-term context have remained poorly understood. The Hala Sultan Tekke Hinterland Survey Project was initiated in 2021 to address this gap by reconstructing the diachronic human–environment dynamics of the Larnaca region and situating Hala Sultan Tekke within its broader spatial and temporal framework.

 

Over five field seasons, the project has employed an integrated landscape approach combining systematic survey, geoarchaeological research, archaeometric analyses, remote sensing, and paleoenvironmental studies.

 

This talk presents key results from the first five years of the project and discusses how integrating landscape archaeology is reshaping our understanding of the Larnaca archaeological landscape.

 

Professor Ralf Vandam is a landscape archaeologist specializing in the Mediterranean region. Since 2022, he has been a full-time tenure-track professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in Belgium. He currently serves as vice-chair of the VUB’s Large Research Group Archaeology, Environmental Changes & Geo-Chemistry (AMGC).

His research focuses on past human-environment interactions and the application of spatial analysis in archaeology. In 2021, he initiated the Hala Sultan Tekke Hinterland Survey Project in Cyprus.

He is currently directing two projects funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO): one on Mediterranean agricultural terraces, and another on the Late Bronze Age–Iron Age transition in the Larnaca Salt Lake region, Cyprus.