Kyrenia district: Şevketoğlu's survey of Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites

Müge Şevketoğlu's survey of Kyrenia district in 1995 and 1996 redated Goceri-Koca Belenk from the Early Bronze Age to mainly the Chalcolithic, and suggested that Tatlısu-Çiftlikdüzü might date from the early seventh or late eighth millennium BC.¹ Müge Hüseyin Şevketoğlu carried it out as a doctoral student of the University of Edinburgh, in the part of Cyprus occupied by Turkey since the invasion of 1974. The fieldwork took place under the Turkish Cypriot authorities there, without the permission of the Republic of Cyprus, with a permit from the Ministry of Education and Culture of the "TRNC", an entity recognised only by Turkey, obtained with the help of the Director of Museums and Antiquities and his assistant.¹ She states that she set out to reassess known sites and check their condition so that protection plans could be drawn up, and chose the district because early excavations had left some dates in doubt and coastal development threatened settlement sites.¹

Of 28 sites selected from Stanley Price's 1979 gazetteer, 22 were found with surface finds.¹ Four sites were surveyed by total surface collection on a 5 x 5 m grid, a method adopted after a trial showed that many diagnostic artefacts lay in uncollected squares of random collection; elsewhere a line of walkers two metres apart collected diagnostic and representative artefacts.¹ Two previously unknown sites, Edremit-Haci Ismail (EDT 95) and Grapas (GRP 97), were found, and several discrete sites were identified at Karşıyaka.¹ The gridded survey at Goceri-Koca Belenk recorded 10,895 sherds, 1,970 chipped stone, 230 ground stone, 105 axes and four figurine fragments.¹ She gave Goceri-Koca Belenk a potential span of c. 4000–2500 BC.¹ At Kirni she reports that the cemetery, previously reported as Early Bronze Age, also contains Chalcolithic tombs.¹ On a visit in 1996 she found there a second, looted, Chalcolithic tomb.¹ Tatlısu-Çiftlikdüzü is a large site of about 280 x 140 m on a cliff, with 20 obsidian pieces among its surface finds. Because it has cattle and plentiful obsidian she suggested an early seventh or late eighth millennium BC date, comparable to Parekklisha-Shillourokambos, and called for direct dating.¹ Summerer reports that the site was partly disturbed by farming and has been professionally investigated since 2000.²

After study the finds were stored in the store room below the shipwreck museum in Kyrenia Castle.¹ Her Edinburgh thesis of 1998 has a book of the same title, Archaeological Field Survey of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic Settlement Sites in Kyrenia District, North Cyprus (BAR International Series S834, 2000).^1,3