The ca.750 years of Cypriot history known as the Prehistoric Bronze Age (ca.2500–1750BCE) have mostly been approached through evolutionary frameworks aiming to explain how the simple societies of the island transformed into more complex ones emerging by the end of this period. Through this teleological approach, Cypriot society has mostly been envisioned as a place of competing aggrandised elites who controlled resources, primarily metal, to achieve dominance within and beyond their communities. Consequently, most members of these communities appear as passive objects of history. This makes such reconstructions of society problematic, as agency for social change is ascribed to only a minority of people.

This thesis takes a different perspective towards understanding the PreBA society. Through a bottom-up approach and a heterarchical conceptual framework, all Cypriots are understood as active agents in the social changes of their communities. Cypriot society is investigated through different scales, namely the communities, their regions and the island. The aim is to elucidate how regional and island-wide patterns are interrelated with community ones and how this shaped diverse social roles and relationships across Cyprus. The scarcity and geographical bias of the PreBA settlement record renders it unsuitable for such an approach. This study therefore combines three different datasets, firstly ceramics (macroscopic fabric, morphology, surface treatment), secondly metal items (morphology, chemical composition), and thirdly the deathways of communities. For the latter, emphasis is placed on the size and form of tombs, storage capacities, presence of precious liquid containers and consumption vessels, and deposition of metal artefacts, as proxies of the mortuary choices of the groups organising them.

This combined approach argues for the presence of distinct regional traditions across the island throughout the period. From the earliest phases, communities with different interests and affordances, composed of groups involved in diverse activities, engaged in strong intra-regional networks, frequent contacts among neighbouring regions, and occasional offshore exchanges, as well as creating an island-wide network of exchange involving tableware, liquids and rare metal. By the end of the period, this network was flourishing, including the regular movement of people, leading to the blurring of some regional attributes and the emergence of new ones.

The study of the social dynamics and connectivity of Prehistoric Bronze Age Cyprus is presented as a promising framework through which ranked societies are approached in a bottom-up manner which conceptualises human agents within diverse scales of interactions in order to understand social change over time. It, thus, creates the opportunity for more inclusive social interpretations, moving beyond the assumptions and constrains of evolutionary societal models.