Akanthou-Çiftlikdüzü: Şevketoğlu's excavations

At Akanthou-Arkosykos, also called Tatlısu-Çiftlikdüzü, on the north coast, the excavators found six mostly circular buildings of stone and mud brick with wall plaster painted white, red or dark brown, and more than 4000 pieces of obsidian from Cappadocia¹. The work was directed by Müge Şevketoğlu at Akanthou-Çiftlikdüzü. Her 1996 survey had shown the site damaged by farming and by an industrial poultry farm that dug trenches to bury dead livestock, and the excavations aimed to assess the site and protect it from agriculture and construction^1,2. Work continued from 1999 until 2005 and again between 2010 and 2012 with limited resources, and assessment and analysis went on in 2014¹. The site lies in the north of the island, occupied by Turkey since 1974, so the excavation took place without the permission of the Republic of Cyprus; Summerer reports that the Republic's Department of Antiquities repeatedly protested against it as "illegal", and that the site is ignored in scholarship because of the "general inaccessibility" of the north². Eastern Mediterranean University supported the first excavations; TÜBİTAK funded further research in 2010 to 2013, and Cyprus International University is the host institution¹.

The team opened one trench of 13 m by 22 m and excavated each deposit in sequence on the single context system, with all contexts dry sieved¹. Şevketoğlu and Hanson distinguish five phases, with six buildings (numbered 425, 426, 427, 561, 644 and 728) in Phase C standing on an extensive plaster surface laid across the whole trench¹. On that surface, under collapse, lay a boar tusk, three pieces of fallow deer antler, a smoothed stone and three complete obsidian blades, read as a possible haft-fitting kit¹. A bedrock-cut ditch about 2 m deep and 4.5 m wide ran east to west along the southern edge of the trench; its fills held disarticulated human bones, mostly south of building 427¹. Over 95% of the obsidian was bladelets with little core debris, which the authors interpret as imported finished products, possibly with Akanthou as an import and distribution point¹. Radiocarbon dates for the earliest phases run from 8234 to 7748 cal BC, and the authors place the site in the Early Aceramic Neolithic, 8200 to 7700 BC, contemporary with Shillourokambos Ancien B and C¹.

Şevketoğlu and Hanson call the site exceptional in Cyprus for the numbers of early Aceramic Neolithic artefacts and the quality of its plaster and mud-brick structures¹. They published a summary of the work in Environmental Archaeology in 2015, with specialist analyses still to be completed, and they report that the site is a scheduled monument with less than 5% excavated¹. A reconstructed dome-shaped Neolithic house stands near Tatlısu-Çiftlikdüzü, and an open-air museum is planned there, according to a 2022 Cyprus International University news item³.