Politiko-Kokkinorotsos: Frankel and Webb's excavation

The excavation at Politiko-Kokkinorotsos found no stone architecture, burial pits or human remains, and a bone assemblage in which deer made up 74.1% of 7,266 identified pieces of large mammal bone¹. David Frankel and Jennifer M. Webb of La Trobe University directed the work². The Sydney Cyprus Survey Project had recorded the site and suggested from geophysics about twelve circular structures; the excavators found none in the tested area². John Hunt had carried out a resistivity survey in November 2005, and he regarded none of the patterns as buried structures².

In April 2006 the team opened twelve trial trenches to check the survey and to assess the site for full-scale excavation. Trenches A and G, over the area where geophysics suggested structures, were almost empty, while the trenches in the densest surface scatter produced pottery and bone, an oven-pit in Trench I and deep ashy soil in Trenches C and J². The 2006 pottery came to 2,238 sherds, mostly red monochrome utilitarian wares like those of Ambelikou Ayios Georghios and Philia Site B². One AMS sample from Trench J gave 2880–2601 CalBC at 95.4% probability². In 2007 a team of La Trobe students cleared about 550 m2 of shallow deposits. Three roughly circular pits and a large natural hollow held most of the finds, and trial trenches showed that the site did not extend far beyond this area^1,3.

The pits, 3 to 5 m across and up to 1 m deep, and the hollow, over 200 m2 and up to 1.5 m deep, held very large quantities of redeposited pottery, stone and bone, perhaps midden dumped to level the area¹. The 2007 finds included 5,704 chipped-stone artefacts, over one tonne of pottery, figurine fragments, shell beads and worked antler and bone^1,3. Eleven AMS dates on single seeds and one conventional date on charcoal show use for a short time, about 2880–2670 cal BC¹. Frankel, Webb and Pike-Tay conclude that the site is best understood as a seasonal hunters' camp¹. Selected fallow deer and caprine teeth were exported to the USA for odontochronological study under a licence from the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus¹. The main excavation report is Webb, Frankel, Croft and McCartney's article in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 75 (2009)⁴.