Akrotiri-Aetokremnos: the Simmons excavations

In the bottom layer of a collapsed cliff shelter on the Akrotiri peninsula, Alan H. Simmons and his team found a bone midden with more bone than matrix, roughly 95 to 98 per cent of it pygmy hippopotamus (Phanourios minutus), from at least 505 individuals, together with three pygmy elephants^1,2. The shelter is Akrotiri-Aetokremnos, and Simmons directed the fieldwork for the Desert Research Institute of the University of Nevada, with a test dig in July 1987, seasons in 1988 and 1990, a peninsula survey in 1991 and a return in 2009^2,3,4.

Permit, funding and the 1987 test

Simmons held a permit from the Department of Antiquities of the Republic of Cyprus, under Vassos Karageorghis as director; the site lies on a British military installation, where the Antiquities Ordinance regulated archaeological activity^2,5. Stuart Swiny, then director of CAARI, took Simmons to the site and put his reputation behind the project². The National Geographic Society funded the 1988 season; in 1990 funding came from it, the Lindley Foundation, the L. S. B. Leakey Foundation and the Desert Research Institute².

The 1987 test lasted two weeks³. The Chronique reports three units fully dug and intact deposit about 0.75 m thick under the shell layer, with Phanourios bone, chipped stone and a hearth-like cone; Simmons later says four small units^2,3. A radiocarbon date, Beta-22811, came out at 10,810 ± 110 BP³.

Digging the shelter

The first aim was to determine whether Aetokremnos was cultural or a natural palaeontological deposit; the next was to date it and to test whether the extinct Phanourios and Elephas were associated with human remains². Winter gales had been damaging the western part of the site between 1985 and 1987, so nearly the whole site had to be excavated².

A security fence was set along the cliff edge, a datum and map established, and the surface collected in a 1 m grid before digging began at the eroded edges and worked inward. The 1 m squares were divided into 50 by 50 cm quadrants, all soil was dry-sieved through quarter-inch mesh, and finds were washed and catalogued each day in a laboratory at the Kourion Museum, Episkopi². In 1988 the deep 1987 unit N98E88/87 was expanded to include N99 and N97, which fixed the basic stratigraphic sequence, and several large roof-fall blocks were removed². In 1990 the collapsed roof was removed completely, exposing about 1 m of sediment on bedrock, and virtually the whole site was dug². Steve Held was field director, David Reese analysed the fauna, and Rolfe D. Mandel worked on the geoarchaeology². By the 1991 report the project had dug 55 m2, including units outside the shelter, which was itself under 40 m2; all but about 2.5 m2 was taken to bedrock¹.

In July 1991 a three-week pedestrian survey covered seven transects on the peninsula, about 122.7 ha, in search of related sites and fossil hippo localities. No new sites were found². Three small surface sites recorded by Brian Pile had been tested in 1990 and yielded little buried deposit and mixed later material².

What the strata held

Four strata were defined: sterile colluvium and roof fall (Stratum 1), the upper cultural zone with the artefacts, features, bird bone and shell (Stratum 2), a discontinuous sterile Stratum 3, and the dense bone midden on the bedrock floor (Stratum 4)^4,6. About a fifth of the Stratum 4 bone was burned and almost none was articulated. Reese's early estimate was 200 individuals; the final report's count is 505^1,2.

Stratum 2 held most of the chipped stone, bird bone and marine shell, with eight of the cultural features. Marine shell totalled 73,365 fragments, 21,576 individuals, mostly topshell^2,6. The final report lists eleven features, mostly casual hearths, plus Feature 1, an ash cone and heap interpreted as a hearth or roasting pit, and Feature 3, a burnt-fauna concentration with over 62,500 Phanourios bones from at least 50 individuals; the 1991 paper counted twelve². By 1991, 1,019 chipped stone artefacts had been recovered¹. The assemblage is a flake and blade assemblage with 128 formal retouched tools, dominated by thumbnail scrapers (28%), with six microliths and no obsidian^1,7. Ornaments include over 125 Dentalium, Columbella and Conus shell beads, six worked picrolite pieces, a pierced and incised calcarenite disk from Stratum 2/4 and one worked Phanourios incisor from Stratum 4B; Reese called the picrolite the earliest stone ornaments on the island^1,2. Birds numbered a minimum of 73 individuals in the final count, mostly great bustard, and 18 suid bones are read by Zazzo and colleagues and by Vigne's team as early wild boar^2,8.

Dating and dispute

The 1991 interim paper gave 29 determinations and a weighted average of 10,464 ± 25 BP for 26 after removing three surface samples, and Simmons called the site the first example of an "Akrotiri Phase"¹. The final report has 31 determinations; Wigand and Simmons read a short occupation centred on 9825 cal BC⁹. Of five alternative models the team set for the site, Simmons concluded that Model 2, a cultural occupation earlier than the documented Aceramic Neolithic, best fits the data². In 2014 he counted 36 determinations and reaffirmed about 300 years centred on 11,775 cal BP⁴.

Knapp reads the site as a specialised activity site, periodically visited by Late Epipalaeolithic fisher-foragers, that somehow involved pygmy hippos¹⁰. Ammerman and Noller (2005) questioned the setting and chronology and asked for new bone dates; Zazzo and colleagues (2015) write that their results give more strength to the scenario in which the stratum 4 hippo bones accumulated naturally^8,11.

Last squares and the finds

In 2009 Simmons returned to excavate the one square metre that remained, recovering much intact hippo bone, bird bone, shell, a few chipped stones and a picrolite pendant blank⁴. A short 2010 season retested three adjacent dune sites⁴. The site is now completely excavated except for a few pockets at the back of the shelter⁴. The final report is Simmons (ed.), Faunal Extinction in an Island Society (1999)². Simmons's unpublished field notes are in the Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas¹². The dated hippo bone samples are curated and permanently held in the Kourion Museum, Episkopi, where Zazzo and colleagues sampled them on loan in May 2009^2,8.