CONCLUSIONS

The new cities of the LC period fundamentally altered the island's physical and social landscape. They were created in the interplay of decisions made at various levels by multiple stakeholders, taking into account factors such as available material and human resources, topography, and whether or not there was preexisting architecture that had to be incorporated or removed (Fisher 2009b:189; Locock 1994:5; Markus 1993:23). On one hand, people made these decisions influenced by shared cultural ideas of what constitutes proper built form, giving rise to standardized building types or methods of construction and embellishment. We can see this in terms of the structural properties of social systems that, according to Giddens (1984:17), make it possible for similar social practices to exist across various spans of space and time and that give systemic form to these practices. This is manifested in the culturally contingenT "limited palette of elements" and "display rules," which people combine to create their built environments (Rapoport 1990:igure 17). On the other hand, Rapoport (1990:15-16, 21) argues that many of the meanings that make a building a place are those encoded by its occupants and users through the process of personalization as they take possession of, complete, and change their built environment. This can be seen as a form of marking one's primary territory by encoding messages regarding self - or household identity (Brown 1987:519521). The numerous idiosyncrasies in coniguration and design even between the so-called twin Complexes A anD B at Pyla-Kokkinokremos

(Karageorghis and Demas 1984: 9; see Figure 6.8) are testament to this process (Fisher 2014).

MAKING THE FIRST CITIES ON CYPRUS

I have argued that the overall form of LC cities was largely the result of top-down decision making by ruling elites who rose to power in the LBA. As Knapp (2008:159) recently claimed, these elites "sought to integrate society more closely than in the past, to resolve ambiguities. . . and to restructure social relationships in a manner that clarified their identity beyond doubt." The large-scale appropriation and control of space through urban planning was a vital component of these efforts, materialized in the gridded streets and fortifications of cities like Enkomi. Yet, this place-making could be met with resistance or subject to negotiation as individual households sought to create places of their own. Shared socioeconomic status or prior community affiliations among these households and the use of common facilities helped to generate the social interactions and built forms that characterized particular neighborhoods. These processes made LC cities places of contestation and fluidity, despite efforts to define social boundaries unambiguously through architectural design and other forms of nonverbal communication. The unique urban landscapes that resulted were at once creator and materialization of the increasingly complex and heterogeneous society that characterized LBA Cyprus. The new cities became an important element in the identities of these individuals and groups, drawn together in the "evocative potency" (A. Smith 2003:27) and "social drama" (Mumford 1937[2003]:94) of the urban experience.