Tremithos valley: the Trent University Neolithic survey

Trent University's survey of the Tremithos River valley, directed by S. Stewart, recorded numerous stone-tool scatters and small sites from the headwaters to the mouth, in a search for Neolithic use of the river corridor and the chert sources near it^1,2. The first season was reported in June 2014¹. The team treated the valley as a possible route between early coastal settlements and the Troodos foothills, and combined predictive modelling with pedestrian survey, using calibrated sweep widths and Bayesian updating to decide where to search next each day². In the upper valley many scatters lay on terraces, spurs or hills above the river, often near tributary confluences, and a small scatter turned up near the mouth in an area stripped for housing². Stewart et al. describe the assemblages as aceramic and typologically consistent with the earliest known assemblages on Cyprus, and suggest the sites probably represent early forays into an unfamiliar landscape after landings on the island; the finds are surface evidence, not directly dated occupations². The results were published in Antiquity in 2017².