Continuities and Discontinuities in Cypriot Prehistory and the Study of Cultural Change

Ioannis Voskos of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens examines cultural change and apparent chronological gaps in Cypriot prehistory. Delivered in Greek at the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus, the lecture critiques traditional culture-historical models and proposes an internal socio-economic explanation for transitions across the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, between the 6th and 3rd millennia BC.

Voskos begins by surveying how theoretical currents in archaeology have approached cultural change. Early twentieth-century research in Cyprus, shaped by Porphyrios Dikaios and Einar Gjerstad of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, established a tripartite framework dividing the Stone Age into the Aceramic Neolithic of Khirokitia, the Ceramic Neolithic of Sotira and the Chalcolithic of Erimi. Because this static model struggled to explain transitions and chronological gaps between phases, scholars such as Hector Catling and Nicholas Stanley Price attributed changes to natural disasters, island abandonment and foreign colonisations. While processual and post-processual archaeology developed internationally from the 1960s, Cypriot Stone Age studies lagged behind as fieldwork focused on the Late Bronze Age and the Achaean colonisation hypothesis promoted by Vassos Karageorghis. From the 1980s, and after the discovery of Epipalaeolithic Akrotiri-Aetokremnos, new interdisciplinary projects reshaped the field.

Turning to the evidence from 6500 to 2500 BC, Voskos analyses subsistence, food storage and household organisation. Reviewing archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological data alongside Joanne Clarke's mobility model, he argues that the continuity of plant varieties between Khirokitia and Sotira disproves abandonment. Instead, Cypriot communities alternated between a semi-permanent foraging and deer-hunting economy during the chronological gaps, and settled agro-pastoralism during the peaks of the Khirokitia, Sotira and Erimi cultures. He traces storage from outdoor pits at Kantou-Koufovounos and communal pit areas at Lemba-Lakkous (exceeding 7,000 litres in capacity) to the privatisation of surplus inside Late Chalcolithic buildings, culminating in the Pithos House at Kissonerga-Mosphilia, where 37 storage jars, olive oil production, metallurgy, weights, seals and faience indicate attempted elite control.

Voskos argues that during the settled phases of Khirokitia, Sotira and Middle Chalcolithic Erimi, population growth and household competition were balanced by levelling mechanisms such as communal feasting, decorated Red-on-White pottery and shared rituals in structures like the Red Building at Kissonerga, excavated by Edgar Peltenburg. When internal tensions grew too strong, communities resisted hierarchy by breaking up permanent settlements and reverting to egalitarian, semi-nomadic life. In the Late Chalcolithic, however, consolidated agro-pastoralism, the replacement of Red-on-White pottery and picrolite objects with monochrome wares, and rising household autonomy made these changes irreversible despite the violent destruction of the Pithos House. Voskos concludes that the Early Bronze Age Philia phase arose from local groups entering Eastern Mediterranean networks rather than an Anatolian colonisation. A question-and-answer session follows on cranial studies, Anatolian ceramic technology and radiocarbon dates.