Settled and Sacred Landscapes of Cyprus: Results of the Fourth Field Season, 2017

Speaking in Greek, Athanasios Vionis of the University of Cyprus reports on the fourth season (July 2017) of the Settled and Sacred Landscapes of Cyprus (SSLaC) archaeological surface survey and field school. Co-directed with Giorgos Papantoniou and Doria Nicolaou in cooperation with the Department of Antiquities, the project investigates the enclosed valley of the Xeros River in the Larnaca district around Kofinou, Agios Theodoros, Alaminos and Menogeia, tracing settlement and land use from the Middle Chalcolithic to 1974.

Vionis outlines the methodology of the four-week 2017 season across the 2,500-hectare survey area. Student fieldwalkers systematically walked 150-metre-wide north-south transects spaced 150 metres apart, recording surface material on handheld computers using ArcPad. In parallel, Vasilis Trigkas completed aerial photography of the entire valley to generate an autonomous high-resolution digital elevation model for viewshed and cost-surface analyses. At the project base in nearby Khirokitia, Charis Paraskeva, Agata Dobosz and Anna Georgiadou catalogued prehistoric, Iron Age, Hellenistic, Roman and Early Byzantine pottery into the Simplex database.

The talk then reviews the diachronic settlement pattern. The earliest site, Alaminos-Zorzakis, where a house floor was recently exposed by a mechanical digger, is dated by Paraskeva to the Middle Chalcolithic, making it the easternmost site of that period known on the island. Early and Middle Bronze Age activity centres on the large settlement of Alaminos-Kambos, south and east of the medieval tower of Alaminos, previously partly excavated by Giorgos Georgiou. In the Cypro-Archaic period settlement shifted to the 13-hectare rural site around the later Byzantine church of Panagia at Kofinou. Storage vessels and amphorae scattered across the valley are attributed by Georgiadou to workshops in the sphere of Amathus, leading Vionis to suggest that the kingdom's eastern boundary may have reached beyond the Pentaschinos River towards Stavrovouni.

Kofinou remained the valley's central settlement through the Hellenistic, Roman, Early Byzantine, medieval and Ottoman periods, with GIS cost-surface analysis showing that the furthest arable land lay within forty minutes' walk. The principal discovery of the 2017 season was a nine-hectare Early Byzantine pottery workshop near the Xeros River in the north-east of the survey zone, identified from kiln furniture and misfired sherds. Producing tiles, water pipes, pithoi, transport jars, jugs and basins, its clay shows a distinct chemical signature in portable XRF analyses conducted by Andreas Charalambous.