Early Neolithic groups gathered seasonally at Ais Giorkis in the Troodos foothills, final report argues

The final report on Ais Giorkis, an early Neolithic site 480 metres up in the western foothills of the Troodos, presents it as a place where groups who lived elsewhere, perhaps on the coastal lowlands, gathered for part of each year to hunt and perhaps to feast and hold ceremonies. The book, From the mountains to the sea, edited by Alan H. Simmons, came out from Astrom Editions in Nicosia in 2023 as volume 156 of Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology (366 pages, ISBN 978-9925-7935-5-6, €53). The prehistorian Alexander Wasse has now reviewed it in the journal Neo-Lithics (issue 24-25), in a review deposited on Zenodo on 22 October.

Wasse judges that seasonal reading sensible and well matched both to the data in the volume and to Neolithic patterns on the island and the mainland. He calls the book "thought-provoking and challenging of preconceptions". With the 2023 final report on Klimonas, an earlier village of around 8,800 calBC linked to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, it made 2023 a year of two major final publications of Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites in Cyprus.

An upland site without houses

Ais Giorkis lies in the lands of Kritou Marottou, some 25 km northeast of Paphos [1, p. 173]. The Canadian Palaipaphos Survey Project recorded it in 1980 and placed it in the Khirokitian, the late phase of the Aceramic Neolithic, since no earlier Neolithic was then thought to exist on the island. Wasse gives 1997 to 2018 as the span of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas team's work there. The excavation itself began with limited test excavations in 1997, ran from 2002 to 2008, and resumed for a second campaign in 2013, 2014 and 2015 [1, p. 173]. The book places the site's use within no more than a few tens of decades around the second quarter of the 8th millennium calBC, broadly the later Middle PPNB (Pre-Pottery Neolithic B) on the mainland.

The finds are plentiful: 276,258 chipped stone artefacts and 973 kg of animal bone, each from roughly a 20% sample of the deposits. None of the houses or communal buildings of 8th-millennium Kalavasos-Tenta turned up. Instead there are six or seven curving platforms, at least one with a central hearth, patches of cobbled paving, pits of several kinds and, on the upslope side, a ditch-like feature that Wasse ties to the Cypriot Neolithic practice of marking a settlement's limits.

In 2018 Simmons, DiBenedetto and Keach wrote that the site could have supported people all year, but that they did not believe it had been occupied through the year, partly because the site lacked the clear hearths a relatively harsh winter would have required; they already floated, as speculation, feasting and seasonal gatherings of coastal and upland villagers [1, pp. 189–190]. The final volume holds to seasonal use. It also traces the ways Neolithic Cyprus departs from mainland norms mainly to people choosing to reject parts of the new way of life, and gives less weight to the island's low population pressure as the cause.

The animal, plant and fish studies

The book runs to 19 chapters, from an introduction to the Cypriot Neolithic and the project's design to a final synthesis. For Wasse the strongest part is the study of economy and environment, above all Chapters 11 to 13 on animal, plant and fish remains.

Paul Croft's chapter deals with the largest identified animal bone assemblage now known from early Neolithic Cyprus. His careful conclusion is that any or all of the animals that could have been domestic may have been free-living, hunted, and interbreeding with herded stock. Some cattle, the volume suggests, may have had a status apart from the other hoofed animals. Wasse would make Croft's conclusion required reading for zooarchaeologists working on mainland sites.

Leilani Lucas found no evidence of crop processing among the plant remains, in contrast to PPNB Mylouthkia at Kissonerga on the coastal lowlands nearby, so cereals and pulses seem to have been carried up as provisions grown somewhere else. Mark Rose had only 20 fish remains to work with. He asks why a few sea fish reached the foothills and proposes a social or symbolic role, perhaps comparable to the exchange of obsidian. Wasse takes these results to show early Neolithic communities on Cyprus probably keeping, and perhaps strengthening, habits more typical of hunter-foragers, such as moving with the seasons, while they took up farming.

Where the reviewer finds fault

Wasse's criticisms concern the record. He wants more primary contextual data and catalogues of the finds, in the book or as online appendices. Elements such as a hearth or a cache of blades are numbered in their own sequence, apart from the platform they belong to, which makes Chapter 4, on features and architecture, hard to follow. Plans are few, and nearly all the section drawings are in Chapter 9, on geoarchaeology.

He also doubts the claim that the site has just three horizontal strata over havara, a calcareous subsoil, with little disturbance since. The volume itself records unstable ground and erosion gullies holding intrusive potsherds. Wasse suggests one such gully may have cut away the south side of the large platform called Feature 17, which would then have been nearly circular with a central hearth. He asks whether it was an open, raised counterpart of a round house floor, suited to summer stays.

The volume has no index, and many works cited in Chapter 8, on the burials, are missing from the bibliography. Wasse attributes many of these shortcomings to the constraints of the publication process.