Settled and Sacred Landscapes of Cyprus (SeSaLaC): Results of the Fifth Field Season (2018)

Athanasios Vionis of the University of Cyprus presents the results of the fifth season of the Settled and Sacred Landscapes of Cyprus (SeSaLaC) archaeological field project and summer school, conducted in July 2018. Given in Greek, the paper reports on intensive surface survey and geoarchaeological work in the Xeros River valley in the Larnaca district, around the modern villages of Kofinou, Agios Theodoros, Alaminos and Menogeia. The project is co-directed with Giorgos Papantoniou and Doria Nicolaou within the Artifact and Landscape Studies Laboratory (ArtLands Lab).

Having completed systematic transect walking across the valley in 2017, the team moved in 2018 to the second phase of fieldwork: the gridded collection and spatial definition of individual sites found in the transects. Six sites in the north-eastern part of the valley, numbered 2 to 7, were surveyed in 25 by 25 metre grids using ArcPad and kernel density estimation to distinguish each site core from its peripheral halo. Total collection in 2 by 2 metre squares within each grid confirmed the reliability of the ceramic sampling method, and a forthcoming geophysical survey with the Institute for Mediterranean Studies in Crete will test whether subsurface remains match the surface calculations.

Aside from Site 5, which dates mainly to the Neolithic, and Site 3, which belongs to the Early and Middle Bronze Age, the surveyed sites date primarily to Late Antiquity and the Early Byzantine period in the 6th and 7th centuries AD, comprising three small settlements of 1.3 to 2.5 hectares and one farmstead under a hectare. Vionis notes that the heavy 6th- and 7th-century pottery cover affects the visibility of earlier phases, though Cypro-Archaic and Cypro-Classical rural communities are also present, spaced at regular intervals and supplying agricultural produce to the kingdom of Amathus. Using demographic and land-use calculations, he estimates that the valley held roughly 1,500 hectares of prime arable land, while the 425 Late Antique families in the area required at least 3.6 hectares each, or 1,530 hectares in total. He argues that this overpopulation exceeded what the valley's land could sustain and, alongside the broader political situation and climatic changes, contributed to the demographic and economic contraction of the following centuries.

The talk concludes with a summary of preliminary geoarchaeological observations in the middle Xeros valley by Pantelitsa Mylona on alluvial terraces and paleosols, the training of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot staff from the Committee on Missing Persons in surface survey methods, and related publications and events.