Frenaros (Vounistiri): Gjerstad's excavation

In 1924 Einar Gjerstad partially excavated a house-floor at Vounistiri, near Phrenaros (Frenaros), and used it to argue that Cyprus had a Stone Age occupation^1,2. He began where surface flints were most numerous and opened a small area. The floor, of stones, gravel and lime, lay 0.20 m below the surface and measured 10.80 m long and up to 8 m wide; an exterior cooking-place lay opposite the entrance². No foundations survived, and he inferred walls of perishable material². He recorded 82 worked flints, concentrated at the cooking-place and just inside the entrance, among them knives, a spearhead, black-flint razors and a small saw². He assigned them to the Neolithic but wrote that, as the find stood alone, only a terminus ante quem could be fixed: the beginning of the Copper Age, about 3000 B.C.². The preliminary report appeared in The Antiquaries Journal in 1926².