Paralimni-Nissia: the Department excavation

Excavations at Paralimni-Nissia, a Ceramic Neolithic settlement on a coastal hillock near Paralimni, uncovered a stone enclosure wall 83 m long around the village. Pavlos Flourentzos of the Department of Antiquities directed the work, which began in 1995^1,2. Herscher compares the houses to those of Sotira Teppes and describes the site as believed to be the largest settlement of its period then known in Cyprus, with a unique coastal location². Winkelmann gives the years of excavation as 1995 to 2001, while Steel names the campaign of 2000 as the last^3,4. A surface survey directed by Flourentzos estimated the settlement at about 3,250 square metres, of which 2,750 were excavated³.

The 1995 and 1996 campaigns exposed seventeen sub-rectangular buildings of rubble and pise on stone foundations, with beaten havara floors, post-base stones and hearths^1,2. In 1998 a horseshoe-shaped enclosure wall was entirely uncovered; it extends for 83 m, with a large central gateway in its south segment⁴. The gateway is 2.2 m wide in its first phase and was later made smaller^2,4. Several less well constructed houses lay outside the wall, and Herscher reports walls, structures and hearths south of it, perhaps a later extension of the settlement^2,4. By 2000, 28 houses had been excavated; Winkelmann, following Flourentzos 2008, gives 40 buildings^3,4. Flourentzos reads the layout as a primitive urban plan, with houses spiralling around a small central free area³.

The finds include combed, red-on-white and coarse pottery, chert chipped stone, ground stone tools and vessels, bone tools, antler, amulets of stone and picrolite, and two anthropomorphic stone figurines; House 5 had three floor levels^1,2,4. The Nissia figurines Winkelmann catalogues are in the Larnaca District Museum, among them FN 173 from the floor of House 20³. Flourentzos published a preliminary report in RDAC 1997¹ and a monograph in 2008³.