Politiko-Troullia: Falconer and Fall's excavations

In 2011 a 38 cm limestone plank figure turned up face down in a courtyard at Politiko-Troullia, the only stone plank figure from a fully documented excavated context¹. It lay in a village that Bayesian modelling of 25 radiocarbon ages places between about 2050 and 1850 cal BCE, a span of roughly two centuries².

A village in the Troodos foothills

Steven E. Falconer and Patricia L. Fall directed survey and excavation at Politiko-Troullia between 2004 and 2016³. The village had first been inferred from gaming stones to the south of the Iron Age ruins of Tamassos, and the study was prompted by hillside terraced fields carpeted with ceramics close to the settlement⁴. The project set out to study village agrarian life and ecology in the Bronze Age before the first cities, through excavation of households and study of the terraces⁵. The work was done under permit from the Department of Antiquities, in affiliation with CAARI in Nicosia².

The Department's reports for 2008 and 2009 name Arizona State University as the directors' institution, and later publications name La Trobe University^5,6,7. Funding came from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society¹.

The first season, 2004, combined archaeological and soil-resistivity survey of two flat fields of about 2 ha, called Troullia East and Troullia West, with a test excavation beside an exposed wall in Troullia West that found at least 3 m of stratified deposit⁴. The resistivity results located buried walls and guided the first excavation units in Troullia East in 2006⁴. Units measured 4 by 4 m, separated by one-metre baulks that were later removed to widen the exposure⁵. Excavated sediment was dry-sieved, and sediment with burned organic content was processed by water flotation⁵. In 2008 students from Cyprus, Canada and the United States took part⁶. Ground-penetrating radar covered about 20 ha in 2014⁸, and a surface survey in 2016 collected artifacts over about 12 ha of the village and the terraced slopes of Koloiokremmos³.

Workshops, courtyards and a well

Troullia East produced a compound of roofed rooms with stone walls, small outbuildings and an exterior workspace, occupied in a single stratigraphic phase^2,5. In the workspace lay a household-scale metallurgical workshop: a carved limestone mould broken into three pieces, copper tongs, hammered copper sheet, tap slags, crucible sherds and a pit that may be a rudimentary furnace⁵. The mould was for a dagger, a chisel and an axe head⁵. Troullia North had a second copper workshop with an external oven, copper slag and tuyere fragments².

Troullia West had two large rectangular courtyards bounded to the south by a 2 m wide alley sloping to Kamaras Creek, with rooms to the north, west and east, rebuilt in several phases within more than 3 m of deposit^1,2,5. The northern courtyard gave fragments of wall plaster carved with herringbone and scrolled motifs¹. The southern courtyard held incised spindle whorls (20 of the 35 found), plank figurines and fallow-deer bones, which Falconer, Monahan and Fall read as communal behaviour and group identity^1,5. Before the 2011 find, Falconer, Monahan and Fall note, only 13 stone plank figures had been reported from Cyprus, four of them from established excavation contexts¹. The alley held community trash, among it ores, slags, pins, needles and the hilt of a broken copper dagger blade, and the site's highest seed density, 82% of it orchard species⁵. A well with stone steps down to the water table served the earlier phases and was capped with compacted limestone plaster when the architecture moved upslope².

The main plant remains are olive, grape, fig and pistachio; the bones point to sheep and goat herding and to hunting of Mesopotamian fallow deer⁵. Falconer and Fall present the village as a pre-urban community with a diversified agrarian economy of arboriculture, herding, hunting and household copper working⁵.

Dating by radiocarbon

The pottery, dominated by Red Polished ware, had suggested an occupation of about 500 years, from Middle Cypriot I to Late Cypriot I². The 2023 radiocarbon study by Falconer, Ridder, Pilaar Birch and Fall argues that the pottery had overestimated the length of occupation². Twenty seed and five charcoal samples were dated by AMS and modelled in OxCal². The architecture of Troullia West shifted upslope and the well was abandoned at about 1981 cal BCE; the authors read this as a response to downcutting along Kamaras Creek that would have eroded the settlement's western edge². Paraskeva's 2019 chronology study treats the Politiko dates as a cluster from about 2140 to 1875 BCE at one sigma and questions the statement that the Politiko East and West phases are roughly contemporaneous⁹.

The village now lies buried in cultivated fields under alluvial and colluvial sediment between Kamaras Creek and the Pediaios River, and the Troullia East excavations were backfilled^2,5.