Identities and Materialities in Prehistoric Cyprus: Evidence of Foreign Cultural Interaction before the Bronze Age

Diane Bolger of the University of Edinburgh examines how communities in southwestern Cyprus engaged with the surrounding mainland during the Middle and Late Chalcolithic periods, from the late fourth into the third millennium BC, well before the Early Bronze Age and the Philia phase. Drawing on excavations directed with Edgar Peltenburg at Lemba-Lakkous, Kissonerga-Mosphilia, and the settlement and cemeteries of Souskiou (Vathyrkakas and Laona), she compares closely spaced sites to show how local communities responded differently to external contacts and reconfigured their personal and social identities.

Bolger outlines Chalcolithic continuities with the Neolithic, including circular houses and single intramural pit graves, before turning to ceramic changes from Middle Chalcolithic Red-on-White ware to Late Chalcolithic monochrome wares with Anatolian affinities, and to early metalwork. She then discusses anthropomorphic figurines and cruciform figurines and pendants made of picrolite. Reinterpreting these objects within gender research rather than as mother goddesses, she notes male, female, dual-sexed and ambiguous examples that point to a fluid, non-binary gender system tied to life-cycle rituals. At Lemba and Kissonerga, most figurines were deliberately broken; in the ceremonial pit at Kissonerga-Mosphilia, dated to the end of the fourth millennium BC, nineteen stone and ten ceramic figurines were intentionally defaced and buried around a damaged ceramic building model, after which figurine production ceased at the site. At Souskiou, by contrast, most figurines and pendants were deposited intact in deep extramural bell-shaped pit tombs, whereas the human skeletons were disarticulated and stacked with skulls arranged in rows for multiple interments.

In the Late Chalcolithic, anthropomorphic imagery disappeared across the island for some five hundred years, replaced by new foreign-derived ornaments and technologies. Bolger presents recent X-ray fluorescence analyses by Lina Kassianidou and Andreas Charalambous on late fourth-millennium faience beads from Souskiou-Laona and Vathyrkakas, several of which contain tin in their glazes, and on Late Chalcolithic metal tools from Lemba and Kissonerga, which shifted from Middle Chalcolithic personal ornaments to chisels and include examples with enough tin to qualify as tin bronze. She contrasts Late Chalcolithic Kissonerga, which adopted chamber tombs, disc-type faience beads, and spurred annular pendants of shell and picrolite with Levantine and Anatolian parallels, with neighbouring Lemba, where pit graves continued, foreign ornaments were absent, Anatolian-style relief pottery and a tin-bearing copper fragment appeared, and the settlement ended in destruction by fire. Drawing on recent research by Charalambos Paraskeva and on John Robb and Oliver Harris's concept of body worlds, she concludes by paying tribute to the memory of Edgar Peltenburg. A question-and-answer session addresses differences between Lemba and Kissonerga, earlier relief pottery at Politiko-Kokkinorotsos, Cyprus Survey material in the north, and whether breakage at Lemba and Kissonerga reflects settlement use prior to burial.