Prastio-Mesorotsos: the Prastio-Mesorotsos Archaeological Project (PMAP)

The settlement at Prasteio-Mesorotsos in the Paphos district has deeply stratified occupation, at present 1.5 m or more thick, running from the Neolithic to the Medieval period¹. Andrew McCarthy directs the Prastio-Mesorotsos Archaeological Project, a University of Edinburgh project that works with CAARI². A 2008 season, reported as non-intrusive, used geophysics, surface collection and GIS, and was published by McCarthy, B. Blakeman, M. Dalton, Lisa Graham, Ian Hill and G. Ritchie in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus³.

The 2009 season ran from 22 June to 30 July. Eight areas and over 100 m² were exposed, giving deep stratified occupation, Middle Cypriot architecture in the same place as Early Cypriot and Late Chalcolithic material, Iron Age and Medieval remains, and a large threshing floor¹. The annual report frames the dig as a way to study social change, including the Neolithic to Chalcolithic transition¹. The fifth season, from 23 June to 28 July 2012, worked on Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Early and Middle Bronze Age deposits and a deep Late Roman and Byzantine sequence in one area, and found an Early Bronze Age infant burial in a domestic context². A web summary of the eleventh season, 10 July to 10 August 2019, reports four areas, with a presumed Chalcolithic house with plaster hearth and quern, a round structure at the Philia transition, and a massive Middle Cypriot river terrace wall later made into a tower⁴.

In Areas V and VI, McCarthy describes a Neolithic ritual pit complex of intercutting shallow pits holding broken special objects: a picrolite spouted bowl, a human head, a broken conical bowl with a pestle, and a fragment of a clay female figurine⁵. Area IV has an unbroken Early to Middle Cypriot sequence from terminal Late Chalcolithic or Philia layers, where the Early Cypriot houses are small roundhouses with thin stone foundations and central hearths; McCarthy writes that no Late Bronze Age material has been recovered anywhere on the site⁵. The 2009 report speaks of an apparent abandonment in the Middle Cypriot III period, and McCarthy writes that the site was reoccupied in the Cypro-Geometric period several hundred years later^1,5. Results of the 2012 season were being prepared for a preliminary report in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus².