The First Neolitic Settlement of Cyprus

The First Neolitic Settlement of Cyprus. North Cyprus the last beautiy in Med.

Around 6000 BC, when lands bordering the East Mediterranean were already enjoying a full and flourishing Neolithic culture, settlers came to Cyprus. They may not have been the first-comers; but that theory is very new. They brought with them fallow deer, which could be herded in the woodlands, pigs, barley seed, a few exotic pieces of ornament, such as cornelian stones, the shells of a mollusc, dentalium, also knife blades made from the sharp glassy volcanic substance, obsidian and probably many other posessions which have long since disappeared. Whatever they brought would have had to. be loaded on rafts or light boats, and it seems that once embarked on this adventure there was no turning back to their homeland: contact was lost. They developed along strongly individual lines and missed out on the mainstream of progress elsewhere. The prestigious goods they had brought with them got rarer and scarcer as time went on because they were not renewable. The Neolithic I culture is unique, fascinating and short-lived. Very little is known about where the settlers came from, nor why they suddenly disappeared after only a few hundred years. Much effort is directed at bridging the gap between this first group of Neolithic settlers and the second colonisation which only happened two or three thousand years later. Coming originally from some home on the mainland, one would expect the first Neolithic settlers to have brought a mature culture with them; and there is plenty of evidence that this was in fact the case. Among the household goods found in their settlements there are very beautiful and sophisticated idols, and bowls made from hard igneous rocks such as andesite and steatite. To make them called for a high degree of skill, yet they seem to have ignored the potter's craft, in contrast to the flourishing mainland centres of Syria and Anatolia. Where did these settlers come from Syria has been suggested as providing the possible source for some of their religious practices and is closer to the natural habitat of their fauna. Yet one or two of the goods which they brought with them, such as obsidian, point to the marginally more distant locality, central Anatolia, which lies to the north. Until a short time ago very little research was directed towards the lithic industry which would have been an essential ingredient of the Neolithic culture, for making their stone vessels, for their tools, and also for their agriculture. Fine examples of worked flint tools and weapons do exist, but they were seldom illustrated in excavation reports, and then only sketchily. There may have been a collecting bias in early excavations towards other, more showy things.

Neolithic I villages are strung out all around the coast of Cyprus. They tend to be on hilltops close to a good supply of fresh water and not far from the sea, with good arable land nearby. The mud brick huts, which stood on stone foundations, were round. At times several were grouped together like the rooms of a house. Some used the ground-floor for storage and had an upper storey for living, reached maybe by a ladder, its floor propped up by a central stone pillar. It is now believed that roofs were flat, not domed, with a smoke-vent at the top. The dead were buried underneath the floors of the houses, and corpses were adorned with necklaces made from cornelian beads and the long thin mollusc shell, dentalium. Occasionally skulls in these burials show evidence for deliberate flattening in infancy. Three sea-girt Neolithic villages of North Cyprus are Cape St Andreas (Turkish, Zaferburnu), Petra tou Limniti, and Troulli. They are on high ground at the water's edge. Cape St Andreas, at the extreme eastern tip of the island, was excavated by a French team between 1970 and 1972. It was probably a colony of fisher-folk. There were hearths, one of which could have been used for smoking fish, while fish bones, sea shells, a few pieces of obsidian and fishing hooks were scattered on the floors of their huts. These were terraced into the steep south-facing slope of the promontory. The site might have extended over 1,000 sq m, but seems to have belonged to one family. Plant remains included the lentil, pea, pistachio, fig, olive, and also wheat and barley. Petra tou Limniti (Turkish, Yesilirmak Kayasi) is a tiny island near Vouni in the north-west, just off-shore from the rocky coast. It was excavated in 1929 by E Gjerstad for the Swedish Cyprus Expedition. There is a rather delightful description in Missions en Chypre10 in which Schaeffer and his colleague had to swim out to visit the site because they could not get a boat and then had very great difficulty scrambling up to the top. This makes the point that it was not a spot to settle permanently and raise a family. It must have been an island even then, though the sea level was probably lower than it is now, since no Neolithic remains have been found on the adjacent headland. Probably it served as a very exposed temporary camp for fishermen from time to time, as the occupation levels imply, lying piled one above the other.

Troulli (east of Kyrenia, Turkish, Girne) is a site which was occupied twice over. It is no longer accessible, having been built upon, but it stood on a prominent little hill which juts out into the sea, six miles east of the village of Ayios Epiktitos (Turkish C.atalkoy). A tiny harbour at the base of the settlement probably was the reason for its existence. Here, in 1941, P Dikaios then curator of the Nicosia Museum of Antiquities and a leading archaeologist, made trial trenches which located the two different strata of Neolithic occupation, termed I and II. A great layer of sterile soil lay between the two layers, which gave a measure of the long passage of time which separated them. This site has formed the basis for the chronology for the whole Neolithic period. A recent detailed assessment by Peltenburg has demonstrated that there are far more foreign goods in this settlement than anywhere else such things as a greenstone chisel, dentalium shells, or obsidian blades. The source for the obsidian has been traced to Chftlik in central Anatolia. Troulli then, might have been the entry point for the whole colonial venture, a first landfall. That could be a reason for stockpiling some luxury goods there. How did Neolithic I come to an end? There are many different opinions but no firm answer. Some suggest that the population died out because of their low level of subsistence economy, which might not have been able to stand up to a bad year, others point to earthquakes, but in that case the settlers would have abandoned their shattered homes and moved elsewhere. However the remains of their homes do not look shattered, their foundations are level and standing to a decent height. If there had been a wholesale population movement, one would expect to find some evidence of their new settlements elsewhere, but there are only two sites on the whole island which might, as a remote possibility, be invoked to bridge the gap, one of them being Philia (Turkish, Serhadkoy) in .the valley of the Ovgos (Guzelyurt deresi). So far the evidence is inconclusive.

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