In spite of excavations at a number of LBA (or Late Cypriot [LC], as it is called locally) urban sites, there has been a notable absence of research into the social aspects of their architectural remains. Until recently, most studies of ancient Cypriot built environments, informed by traditional art-historical and culture-historical paradigms, have been descriptive rather than explanatory, focusing on issues such as stylistic classification and change, chronology, or the technical aspects of construction. In probably the most comprehensive work on ancient Cypriot architecture, Wright (1992), while recognizing the significance of the emergence of "urban society" in the Bronze Age, offers no explanation as to its cause or profound
Social effects. Recognizing the limitations of such approaches, some scholars in the 1990s tried to explain the rise of urbanism in terms of the emergence and development of sociopolitical complexity (e. g., Keswani 1993; Knapp 1993; Knapp et al. 1994). Influenced by the pro-cessual paradigm in archaeology, the appearance of cities on Late Bronze Age Cyprus was viewed as the result of processes of demographic growth and nucleation and politico-economic development, usually characterized as "state formation." Such an approach emphasized the function of the new settlements within systems of production and exchange, classifying them according to their place within a politico-economic hierarchy (Keswani 1993, Knapp 1997:Ch. 5; Negbi 2005; Peltenburg 1996).
MAKING THE FIRST CITIES ON CYPRUS
Although these approaches are important in highlighting the function and articulation of settlement systems in a general sense, they ultimately fail to shed light on the far more signiicant social role that cities played in revolutionizing the lives of the people that lived in and around them. Even recent agent-based approaches that recognize the vital role of the built environment in social reproduction (e. g., Bolger 2003; Knapp 2008) have not adequately addressed the transformative nature of the new cities. Archaeologists working in Cyprus have often been reluctant to call the new urban settlements "cities," preferring instead to use the terms "centers" or, more often, "towns" (e. g., Knapp 2008; Negbi 2005; South 1995; Wright 1992). This reluctance likely stems in part from the relatively small size attributed to most LC urban sites, with two of the best known, Enkomi and Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, having sizes of 14 and 11.5 ha, respectively.1 As lacovou (2007) rightly points out, however, such estimates as published in various tables and charts (e. g., Knapp 1997:igure 5 and table 2) have taken on the weight of fact, in spite of being based on sources that use very little hard data or that amalgamate data from several phases of occupation. In any case, I have no dificulty deining the urban centers discussed here as cities.
Trying to deine city is a complicated matter and there is no consensus among archaeologists, or even among scholars of contemporary urbanism. Factors such as large size, a dense aggregation of people, socioeconomic heterogeneity, anD the performance of specialized functions in relation to their hinterlands are commonly cited as characteristics of cities (Kostof 1991:37; Trigger 2003:120; Wirth 1938:8). Yet, I would agree with Cowgill's (2004:526) argument that a "somewhat fuzzy core concept" is more appropriate than deinitions
Based on specific sizes or population levels - neither of which is easily determined in archaeological contexts (also Trigger 2003:120). We might define a city, therefore, as "a permanent settlement within the larger territory occupied by a society, considered home to a sig-niicant number of residents whose activities, roles, practices, experiences, identities, and attitudes differ significantly from those of other members of the society who identify most closely with 'rural' lands outside such settlements" (Cowgill 2004:526). An important distinction between urban (referring to "city-ness" [Cowgill 2004:527]) and nonurban, then, is one of identities. Monica Smith (2003:8) refers to it as an urban "ethos."
To see a city as being about its effects on people's lives and the formation oF their identities is to see it as a place: the dynamic, socially constructed and meaningful context of human action and experience (Feld and Basso 1996; Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003; Preucel and Meskell 2004; Rodman 1992; Tuan 1977). In trying to understand the relationship between people and their built environments, I take an approach that acknowledges the agency of both. It is informed on a theoretical level by the work oF Giddens (1979, 1984) and others (e. g., Bourdieu 1973, 1977; Lefebvre 1991) who argue for a mutually constituting relationship between human action and social reproduction. More than mere settings for these actions, built environments play an active role in the structuring and routinizing of embodied practice through whicH the structural properties of social systems are produced, reproduced, and transformed. In this way cities are both producer and product of social life. Their creation and transformation are acts of place-making carried out by a range of individuals and groups at various spatial scales (M. L. Smith 2003; Soja 2000).
To investigate how this social dynamic played out in the LC built environment, I have developed an integrative approach (see Lawrence and Low 1990:482-491) that allows one to examine how built form provides contexts for various social interactions, including public-inclusive and private-exclusive social occasions, through which social boundaries and identities are negotiated and materialized (Fisher 2007, 2009a; see also Goffman 1963). The approach examines how built environments influence movement and interaction potential through their configuration and by encoding and nonverbally communicating meanings that are perceived by their occupants and visitors, potentially influencing their behavior (see Hillier and Hanson 1984; Rapoport 1990). The aim of the integrative
Approach, therefore, is to repopulate the contexts in which past social interactions took place. I have applied this approach to the analysis of LC monumental buildings (Fisher 2007, 2009b) and, more recently, used it to examine the changing nature of house and household in the LC period and their articulation with urban communities (Fisher 2014). These are what Isbell (2000; after Anderson 1991) refers to as "imagined communities," which are dynamic, fluid, and changing social institutions, formed as actors select among available alternatives while striving to create new ones in order to achieve their goals. They are historically contingent and "ever-emergent" communities that generate and are generated by supra-household interactions that are structured and synchronized by a set of places within a particular span of time (Yaeger and Canuto 2000:5-6; also Knapp 2003).
MAKING THE FIRST CITIES ON CYPRUS
Building on this work, I will discuss how acts of place-making were materialized in LC urban landscapes at a range of spatial scales, from various levels of urban community such as the city itself and its neighborhoods, to individual buIldings and their constituent spaces. First, however, I will briefly outline some of the key developments that accompanied the rise of the irst cities on Cyprus.
World History
