Ayios Tychonas-Klimonas: the Collège de France excavations

At Ayios Tychonas-Klimonas the excavators found a village centred on a circular communal building 10 m across, dug at least 1 m into the ground, with more than 100 arrowheads in its fill^1,2. Jean Guilaine, Jean-Denis Vigne and François Briois directed the work for the Collège de France with the CNRS and the École française d'Athènes, under authorisation from the Department of Antiquities^2,3. In October 2009 eleven trenches in plots 168 and 169 were meant to ascertain whether undisturbed early Pre-Pottery Neolithic deposits survived; trenches 168.3 and 168.5 held rich, apparently undisturbed layers, and charcoal, burnt bone and tooth enamel gave at least one occupation at c. 8,700 cal BC⁴.

Excavation campaigns followed in 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015 and 2016, with a study season on the finds in 2017². In 2011 more than 700 m2 was mechanically stripped and 212 m2 excavated, including the communal building ST 10¹. In 2014 geophysical prospection and mechanical strips located two further sectors, F to the north-west and B to the south². Building St 800 in sector F was 6 m across, with a plastered floor and a cob wall set in a foundation trench; in 2016 sector B yielded 21 remains of circular buildings 3.5 to 7 m across². The 2017 notice gives the preserved village area as 5600 m2², and Wasse estimates the extent at between 5,500 and 9,000 m2⁵. Two human teeth and small bone fragments are the earliest human remains from Cyprus; small domestic dogs and cat were also present, and impressions of barley and emmer chaff were found in building earth¹. Wasse, reviewing the final volume, dates the occupation to a few decades centred on 8,800 cal BCE, lasting no more than three or four generations⁵.

The excavation report for 2011 went to the Department of Antiquities in June 2011, and the Ayios Tychonas base of the École française d'Athènes served for processing and storing the finds^1,2. The final volume, edited by Vigne, Briois and Guilaine, appeared in 2023 as Klimonas. An early Pre-Pottery Neolithic village in Cyprus; Wasse counts 38 buildings or remains excavated⁵.