Kissonerga-Mosphilia: the Lemba Archaeological Project excavations

In 1987 the Lemba Archaeological Project found a pit at Kissonerga-Mosphilia cut through the white plaster floor of Building 994. It held 56 recorded objects, among them a house-model bowl with a detachable door, nine pottery and ten stone figurines, and three pottery females seated on four-legged stools in the act of giving birth^1,2. The deposit, Unit 1015, is one find from a site that Edgar Peltenburg's team defined in five periods, from Late Neolithic to the transition to the Early Bronze Age².

Survey and soundings, 1976 to 1980

Edgar J. Peltenburg directed the University of Edinburgh team that established the Lemba Archaeological Project in 1976^1,3. Funders named for the 1982 and 1987 seasons included the British Academy, the British Museum and the National Museums of Scotland^1,4. The first work was intensive surface collection at Kissonerga-Mosphilia in 1976; the 12.3 ha site gave fine Lemba-series wares, handled stone bowls and painted terracotta figurines⁵. A 1978 survey of the district judged Mosphilia the largest and most threatened site and located Kissonerga-Skalia and Chlorakas-Palloures⁶. A sondage in 1980 showed that in situ prehistoric deposits would be found only well to the north of the present course of the Skotinis, which led to a trial at the site centre in 1982⁴. Peltenburg wrote that Mosphilia was dug as part of the project's multisite programme when agriculture threatened it, to ask why exceptionally large Mediterranean settlements differed from smaller ones².

The 1982 trial and the main campaigns

The 1982 trial ran for ten weeks with 25 participants, in three 5 x 5 m squares in Plot 157. Units 1 and 4 were superimposed circular buildings, with a child burial that had a miniature picrolite pendant. Mixed deposits above them held Black Slip-and-Combed and Red Polished (Philia) sherds, not found before in western Cyprus^4,7. The 1983 campaign, the seventh of the Lemba programme, opened about 375 m2 at Mosphilia in twelve weeks. Large round Red-on-White buildings 8 to 11 m across lay in the early period, and nine small buildings in the later one, with two chamber tombs under Unit 98 (Tomb 5)⁸.

By the 1986 season, the third at Mosphilia, the excavation covered over 600 m2 in a north and a south sector. Unit 206, a Middle Chalcolithic round building estimated at 12 to 15 m across, had a north room painted red and 31 vessels on its floor. In the Late Chalcolithic levels, Unit 3 held a cache of 29 axes and adzes and about forty pithoi, and thirty graves included chamber tomb 526⁹. The 1987 season combined study with small-scale excavation: pottery from Buildings 3, 206 and 855 was restored, and soundings reached Periods 1, 2 and 5¹. Further seasons followed in 1988 and 1990^2,10. Because erosion and ploughing had blurred the stratigraphy, Peltenburg fixed the periods by isolating vertical sets of deposits, matrix analysis and extrapolation from the ceramic record².

The five periods

Period 1, Late Neolithic, survives only as unabraded Combed and Red-on-White pottery, the first Late Neolithic deposits excavated in western Cyprus². Period 2, Early Chalcolithic, appears in pits and burial slots about 100 m to the east. Grave 554 had a human-shaped slab over the inhumation and malachite in a bivalve shell at the feet².

Period 3, Middle Chalcolithic, brought a group of circular buildings more than 8.5 m across, with calcarenite foundations and hard limed floors, beside small huts separated by a paved track. Peltenburg describes them as the largest in prehistoric Cyprus and as short-lived². A fragment from this period is the largest picrolite cruciform figurine from Cyprus, with a surviving height of 16.3 cm².

In Period 4, Late Chalcolithic, a major building, Building 3 (the Pithos House), stood among small dispersed buildings. Fire destroyed it with about 40 pithoi and 20 smaller vessels among the trapped objects, and 29 axes and adzes lay cached below the floor². Peltenburg argues that it was an exceptional storage house indicating unequal control of labour, and that the buildings of this period show emerging asymmetry that did not lead to urbanism². Later pits held copper ore and a limestone conical stamp seal, which Peltenburg calls the earliest securely dated example from Cyprus². Chamber tombs with funerary furniture appear beside pit graves, with multiple burials. Tomb 5 was a bilobate chamber tomb under the hearth of Building 98 with a 1.6 m shaft and two chambers^2,8. The 1983 notice saw in the chamber tombs the first appearance of Bronze Age burial customs in a Chalcolithic community⁸.

Period 5, the transition to the Early Bronze Age, is represented by Red Polished (Philia) and Black Slip-and-Combed pottery in disturbed upper deposits, where ploughing and terracing left poor preservation. Grave 529, of a child, had a miniature dentalium necklace, an annular shell pendant and a copper spiral ring². Peltenburg offers two models for how Kissonerga 4 relates to the central Cypriot Philia group and prefers regional variation². He dates the whole occupation to about 4500 to 2300 BC on radiocarbon dates and artefact correlations, and doubts that it was continuous in the main excavated area².

The 1987 pit, Unit 1015, held a house-model bowl with an entrance, a detachable door with pivot and a central hearth. No burial lay in the deposit; the pottery and most stone objects were broken, and Peltenburg writes that the model had been intentionally defaced². He reads Unit 1015 as a closure or departure ceremony before the area was abandoned, and the figurine deposits as evidence that Kissonerga was a ceremonial centre².

Publication and the site

Peltenburg called the Kissonerga evidence the fullest from a Chalcolithic site on Cyprus². The final reports are Excavations at Kissonerga-Mosphilia (Lemba Archaeological Project II.1A, SIMA 70:2, 1998) and the specialist studies as Edinburgh Occasional Paper 19 (1998), with A Ceremonial Area at Kissonerga (SIMA 70:3, 1991)^11,12,13. When Peltenburg wrote in 1991, the site had been deeply terraced for agriculture and most of it was planted with banana trees².