From the Chalcolithic to the Bronze Age at Kissonerga

Lindy Crewe, Director of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, examines the transition from the Chalcolithic to the Early Bronze Age and Middle Bronze Age through the neighboring settlements of Kissonerga-Mosphilia and Kissonerga-Skalia in western Cyprus. Unlike most Chalcolithic settlements on the island, which were abandoned at the end of the period, the locality of Kissonerga shows continuous habitation across the overlapping Philia phase down to the transition to the Late Cypriot period.

Crewe outlines the major transformations between the two eras, including the shift from single-room roundhouses to rectilinear architecture, the move to extramural cemeteries, the introduction of cattle, donkeys, and woolly sheep, and new cooking, metallurgical, and textile technologies. Building on the excavations of Edgar Peltenburg and ceramic studies by Diane Bolger at Mosphilia, she traces how innovations appeared sequentially rather than as a single package. In Late Chalcolithic Period 4 at Mosphilia, local potters exploited non-calcareous clays from the Mavrokolymbos river valley to produce thin-walled Red-and-Black Stroke-Burnished ware, while chamber tombs also appeared within the settlement. Imported Red Polished Philia ware, copper tools, spurred annular pendants, and terracotta spindle whorls from the northwestern Philia heartland soon followed, alongside local imitations and, in Period 5, cattle bones and jar burials.

Turning to her own excavations at Kissonerga-Skalia, Crewe presents early stratified deposits and architecture where local potters used the same Mamonia complex clays to imitate Philia, Vounous, and south-coast vessel forms, developing a local Drab Polished ware tradition that continued through the Middle Cypriot period. In the final phase of the site, dating to the Middle Cypriot III to Late Cypriot I transition and dominated by an industrial complex including a beer-making courtyard, new island-wide connections appear in the form of Karpas-style spindle whorls, handmade pithoi, and wheelmade vessels imitating Canaanite jars, alongside a pit containing shaped cattle skulls.

The final part of the lecture examines Kissonerga-Skalia's engagement with the sea, located 300 metres away. The site has yielded over 6,400 marine shells, chiefly limpets and top shells, including twenty large limpet shells pierced with double holes and concentrated deposits of small limpets in the final-phase courtyard alongside unwashed juglets. Crewe discusses ethnographic parallels for the use of limpets in food, brewing, perfume, and medicine, and presents four copper fish hooks found at Skalia, the only examples known from the Early and Middle Cypriot Bronze Age.