Everything in Nature Invites Us Constantly to Be What We Are: Exploring the Evolution of Humans and Natural Communities in Ancient Cyprus via Multi-Proxy Analysis

Francesca Chelazzi of Durham University examines the interaction between human societies and natural communities in Cyprus across the Holocene through multi-proxy analysis. Framing her study with concepts of coevolution and conviviality, she explains how large archaeological legacy datasets can be combined to model long-term trajectories of population, subsistence, and climate and landscape.

Chelazzi first outlines the three categories of proxy data and their statistical tools: archaeodemographic proxies from survey catalogues and summed probability distributions (SPD) of radiocarbon dates; bioarchaeological proxies from archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological assemblages; and palaeoclimatic proxies from stable isotopes and pollen cores. Applying these methods to Cyprus, she draws on a dataset of over 8,000 site phases from 1,500 surveyed sites alongside 493 radiocarbon dates from 54 Cypriot sites. She traces demographic curves from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic through the Early Bronze Age, Late Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Roman periods, noting how heavy reliance on radiocarbon dating in prehistory and typochronology in later periods skews the curves, and how regional patterns differ across the southwest, the southeast, the Troodos, the Mesaoria, and the north coast.

Turning to bioarchaeological data synthesized by Lucas and Fuller, the lecture tracks subsistence shifts from the hunting of fallow deer (Dama mesopotamica) at Aceramic Neolithic sites such as Khirokitia and Kalavasos-Tenta to crop diversification in the Ceramic Neolithic and integrated farming and caprine herding in the Chalcolithic. In the Bronze Age, cattle facilitated agricultural expansion, while Late Bronze Age settlements shifted toward fertile coastal plains and replaced drought-resistant glume wheat with free-threshing wheat suited to centralized storage at sites like Hala Sultan Tekke.

Finally, Chelazzi compares these demographic and agrarian trends with palaeoclimatic records, moving from regional Levantine and Anatolian speleothems to Cypriot pollen cores from the Troodos (Almyrolivado and Pasha Livadi, studied by Areti Christodoulou), the Akrotiri peninsula, and the Larnaca Salt Lake. She examines how the 8.2, 4.2, and 3.2 ka BP climate events registered locally. In the Troodos, woodland pollen dropped during the Bronze Age boom in copper metallurgy before pine forests regenerated in the Early Iron Age, while the coastal cores from Akrotiri and Larnaca show a rise in dry steppe taxa and a drop in cereal pollen around the 4.2 and 3.2 ka BP arid intervals.