With great pleasure, CAARI announces the appointment of Dr. LINDY CREWE as its new Director. A leading scholar of Bronze Age Cyprus, Dr. Crewe comes to CAARI from the University of Manchester, England, where she is a Lecturer in Archaeology. Like Dr. McCarthy, whom she has known since graduate school, Dr. Crewe studied under Professor Edgar (“Eddie”) Peltenburg at the University of Edinburgh, and excavates in western Cyprus.
The author of two books and 35 articles, she is currently working with Dr. Diane Bolger on the publication of the remarkable Chalcolithic cemetery and settlement at Souskiou-Laona. “It is the site Eddie was most passionate about,” she says, and its publication was left unfinished at his recent death.
Dr. Crewe grew up in Sydney, Australia. Art and ancient history were her two greatest fascinations for as long as she can remember. Success as a graphic designer in Melbourne left her unsatisfied, and she enrolled instead at La Trobe University. Here she found archaeology, the perfect conjunction of her two main interests. Eight muddy, winter weeks of excavation at her Professors David Frankel and Jenny Webb’s site at Marki-Alonia introduced her to Cyprus. Those who dig in Cyprus’ summer heat will chuckle at her recollection of coming in to CAARI to get warm. She stayed on afterward at CAARI to pursue her undergrad Honors thesis on spindle whorls, and speaks warmly of the wonderful support she received from then-Director, Dr. Nancy Serwint.
After publishing her thesis as her first book, she went on to a Ph.D. in Europe under Professor Peltenburg. He introduced her to western Cyprus, and to summertime excavation, at Souskiou-Laona, where she served as Field Director from 2001 to 2006. In 2005-2006 she served as the Cyprus Curator in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, and in 2007 her second book, on Enkomi, was published. This allowed her to extend onto a far larger canvas her interest in the way pottery and its changing technology reveal patterns of social interactions and trade relations.
In 2007 Dr. Crewe assumed the directorship of the excavations of Kissonerga-Skalia, a post she still holds. A powerful Bronze Age site that also offers rich insights into the relation of Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age developments, Kissonerga has given ample scope to her keen interest in archaeology as a record of social change, and to her expertise in the technologies and transmission of ceramic forms both within and outside of Cyprus. It also yielded a remarkably well-preserved Bronze Age brewery for producing beer, depicted here, a discovery gleefully reported all around globe. Continuing relations as a visiting academic with the British Museum also allowed her to unite her archaeological expertise with her interest in public dissemination of finds through the creation of on-line presentations on Kissonerga, and she has plans for a far larger digital project ahead.
Dr. Crewe looks forward to bringing her expertise and her many ideas for archaeology to life at CAARI. At home with information technology, she expects to make it a far stronger aspect of CAARI. She looks forward, too, to seeing vigorous use of the petrological laboratory that Dr. McCarthy developed at CAARI. In terms of CAARI’s programs, she believes that a broader interdisciplinary scope can serve both CAARI itself, and archaeology as a discipline. “The ‘material turn’ occurring in many disciplines (e.g., history, art history, anthropology, sociology, law) provides an opportunity for them to come to us as ‘material culture’ people,” she says. She hopes, too, to find ways to make CAARI the incubator of projects that help young professionals in the eastern Mediterranean come together, build professional relationships, and do significant work together. And she regards outreach projects, especially outreach to children, as particularly important. “It is they who will need to care for things in the future.”
Dr. Crewe and her husband, Dr. Manolis Melissaris, Associate Professor in the Department of Law at the London School of Economics, will arrive in Nicosia in June. We welcome them to CAARI with warmth!
Published by