From exploration to exploitation: Giovanni Mariti, Domenico Sestini, Antonio Mondaini and the early history of Cypriote archaeology

The earliest history of Cypriot archaeology is a horizon still largely dominated by the interests of antiquarianism and the history of collecting, but it undoubtedly constitutes a fundamental chapter in understanding many of the phenomena and current connotations of archaeology in Cyprus through the twentieth century. In fact, the extractivist model of nineteenth and twentieth-century archaeology in Cyprus stimulates a paradigm, explicit in practice, involving foreign expeditions to the island. This stimulus is not unrelated to feeding the logic behind illegal and clandestine digging, which takes the form of a parallel channel of supply for private collecting on the island and beyond, in the vast supposedly post- or de-colonial Western universe. From this perspective, this book analyses a particular moment of transition that constitutes the genuine genesis of European interest in the Antiquity of Cyprus. A moment in which the evidence takes the tangible form of archaeological objects, losing the more ethereal form of scholarly references. We may investigate this gradual change through the practice of three Italian travellers/pseudoarchaeologists who stayed on the island at the end of the eighteenth century. Through their stories, we will try to observe the island’s antiquities as they emerged to their attention, what form they might take and what practices they might produce. Attention, forms, and practices that our travellers passed on to those who followed them in the following two centuries.