Published: March 8, 2007

University of London scholar Cyprian Broodbank will speak at the University of Colorado at Boulder on Tuesday, March 13, about the island of Kythera in the Aegean Sea and its relationship to the Minoans of Crete during the Bronze Age.

The 7 p.m. talk, which is free and open to the public, is titled "Before Aphrodite: the Island of Kythera and the Minoans in the Aegean." The event will be held in the Ramaley Biology Building, room N1B23, and is sponsored by the CU-Boulder classics department and the Boulder Society of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Paid parking for the event is located at the Euclid Autopark just east of the University Memorial Center at Euclid Avenue and Broadway.

Broodbank, whose research recently was featured in Archaeology magazine, will describe his groundbreaking excavations on Kythera, which was strategically located on a major trade route between Greece, Egypt and Minoan Crete. Director of the Kythera Project, he has published studies of Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures in the eastern Mediterranean.

Broodbank is co-director of the Kythera Island Project investigating the cultural and natural dynamics of Kythera, a stepping stone for maritime activity in Greece with a history of occupation spanning 7,000 years. He is affiliated with Cambridge, Leiden, Oxford and Baylor universities and received his doctorate in 1996 at Cambridge.