In this chapter, Kearns traces the novel politics and communities developing in the neighboring Vasilikos and Maroni river valleys, to the east of the town of Amathus. Their commonly described position as a marginal hinterland provides an opportunity to explore rural dynamics at multiple registers. Survey data and rescue excavations form an evidentiary dataset with which to interrogate the generative ties between clusters of settlements and Amathus that produced unruliness across variable and interconnected scales. One critical theme is continuity and impermanence, and the differentiated patterns of access, appropriation, and management taken up by groups returning to sites of prehistoric and protohistoric occupation. Another is social stratification, which entails the development of local autonomous figures, potential community leaders, or members with elevated status. These actors advanced special relationships with Amathusian authorities and local groups through the construction of gathering places such as cemeteries and shrines. The chapter situates these dynamics in habitation, non-quotidian activity, and land use within a framework of a small near-shore world entangling rural sites with maritime economies.

This chapter provides a survey of the close of the Late Bronze Age and the rise of Iron Age towns, and delivers an updated synthesis of existing evidence and arguments for climatic shifts across the eastern Mediterranean from the twelfth to fourth centuries BCE. Kearns then undertakes an island-wide comparative analysis of ruralization and urbanization apparent in survey records by the mid-first millennium BCE. Focusing on legacy and recent survey data, the chapter argues for oscillations in sedentism across the island as communities experienced environmental changes and cultivated new weathering practices, and situates the re-emergence of social differentiation in the relationships between households and land and new spaces for public gathering at tombs and shrines.