Alan H. Simmons

Simmons first heard of Aetokremnos from his colleague Gary Rollefson, and Stuart Swiny suggested by letter that he visit the site to judge it himself⁸. He first came to Cyprus as a side trip after a season of excavation at the Aceramic Neolithic settlement of 'Ain Ghazal in Jordan⁸. Swiny had already asked Vassos Karageorghis early in 1981 to consider investigating the site, and Karageorghis recalls that he had reservations, and was more doubtful still after visiting it a few months later⁸.

The sources differ on when the digging began^23,24. Simmons wrote in 2013 that he first saw the site in 1986 and started excavations there in 1988²³. The Chronique of the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique reports test excavations in July 1987, carried out for the Desert Research Institute of the University of Nevada and directed by Simmons, and Simmons's own final report speaks of a limited test excavation in 1987 after attempts to find funding had failed^8,24. According to Simmons, that test found chipped stone tools in direct, primary context with the bones of the pygmy hippopotamus Phanourios⁸. He published the find in Nature in 1988⁸.

Karageorghis counts three seasons, in 1987, 1988 and 1990, in which Simmons and his collaborators dug nearly the whole site, less than 40 square metres in extent⁸. David S. Reese took part in all three seasons, and Steve Held was field director⁸. The 1988 Chronique stated that site E showed cultural activity associated with two extinct Pleistocene faunas, the pygmy hippopotamus and the pygmy elephant²⁵. The project's last fieldwork was a survey of a small part of the Akrotiri peninsula in 1991; besides Aetokremnos, three other sites were tested²⁶.

Simmons and Reese wrote in Archaeology in 1993, noting that among a few researchers doubts still persisted about the association of humans and hippos²⁷. The final report, Faunal Extinction in an Island Society, appeared in 1999 under the names of Simmons and Associates⁸. Its conclusion is that Aetokremnos was, to date, the earliest site in Cyprus, and that people were responsible for pushing an extinction event⁸. In his foreword Karageorghis wrote that he had been "critical" throughout, not of the methods used but of the stratigraphic study and its interpretation; he also called the results impressive and congratulated Simmons and his team for publishing promptly⁸.

Reese says that Bunimovitz and Barkai, in 1996, were the first to argue that Aetokremnos was a Late Pleistocene fossil deposit of the usual Cypriot kind with a later prehistoric site lying directly above it, and that Olsen (1999), Grayson (2000) and Binford (2000) consider them correct²⁸. Simmons set out his case for the association in "Whose myth?" in the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology in 1996²⁹. He later called Bunimovitz and Barkai's redrawing of a published section as a pit "one of the most egregious affronts" to the site's stratigraphy, which he describes as "crystal clear", with no evidence of mixing³⁰.

Sandra Olsen, Simmons reports, examined a large sample of the hippo bones and dismissed the cultural link because she found no cut marks³⁰. Simmons published her conclusions in the final volume with commentary on why the absence of cut marks was not critical, and says the argument was answered there point by point^29,30. Lewis Binford reviewed the book in American Antiquity in 2000²⁹. Helen Dawson reports that Binford dismissed as "puzzling" Simmons's claim that the bones proved a human-caused extinction, and argued that Simmons ignored evidence against his view, such as bones without cut marks or breakage for marrow³¹. Simmons wrote that he was "oddly flattered" by the review, though Binford "did not read the entire work"³⁰. On the other side, Dawson notes that Cherry had supported a human-induced extinction in 1990³¹.

Albert J. Ammerman and Noller challenged the site in 2005, and Simmons wrote that they had seriously misread the chronology and geomorphology chapters of the final volume²⁹. Simmons and Mandel replied in World Archaeology in 2007²⁹. Dawson judges that redating inconclusive, and notes a reading by Ammerman and others that puts the stratum 2 dates in the eleventh millennium cal BC and suggests a longer occupation³¹. In 2009 Simmons returned to dig the limited deposits left at Aetokremnos³². In a twenty-year assessment published in 2013 he wrote that the site remained controversial less for its date than for the claimed association of cultural material with the extinct fauna, and ended by affirming the integrity of the site and of his team's interpretation²³. In 2012 he still held that, though disputed by some, the evidence strongly suggests humans were instrumental in finishing off the pygmy hippos, already stressed by the Younger Dryas¹⁸.

In 1992 Simmons, then at the Desert Research Institute, directed a short campaign of soundings at Kholetria-Ortos in the Paphos district, an Aceramic Neolithic site found by the Canadian Palaepaphos survey team³³. An excavation season followed in 1993, when more than 28,000 chipped stone objects were collected, and a third campaign in 1994^34,35. In his own later account he dates the Ortos excavation to "the late 1990s", which does not match the Chronique's 1992 to 1994³⁰. He says the work put weight on chipped stone, long neglected in Cyprus³⁰. Tom Strasser and Curtis Runnels thought a hand-axe from the surface at Ortos might be Lower Palaeolithic, but Simmons was reluctant to treat it as convincing evidence³⁰.

In 1997 Simmons led test excavations for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) at Ais Giorkis and Kannaviou-Kochina; Kochina proved a heavily damaged site, while only 3 square metres at Ais Giorkis gave much chipped stone and cattle bones³⁶. Another 23 square metres were dug in 2002, and the work continued in 2003 and 2004, when a structure first taken as semicircular proved circular, 3.5 to 4 metres across^36,37. He directed a further season in 2009, which coded over 10,000 tools and surveyed about 100,000 square metres around the site, locating three sites³². Renewed investigations in 2013 to 2015 were published with Katelyn E. DiBenedetto and Levi Keach³⁸.

Simmons writes that Ais Giorkis, at first taken for a brief upland deer-hunting camp, revealed at least three stone "rotundas" unlike anything known in the Cypriot Neolithic, with domesticated barley and emmer and small amounts of cattle²⁹. He dated it to about 7500 cal BC and reported some of the oldest directly dated domesticated plants, and cattle bones not previously recorded in Cyprus before the Bronze Age³⁹. Lâtife Summerer found it odd that he discussed the new finds at Tatlısu/Akanthou in the north in a 2012 article but in 2017, in a Department of Antiquities volume, "beats instead around the bush", which she reads as his not being allowed to mention them⁴⁰.

In 1993 Simmons was associate professor of anthropology at UNLV and adjunct associate professor in the Quaternary Sciences Center of the Desert Research Institute²⁷. By 2012 he was Distinguished Professor of Anthropology there, with more than 35 years of field and research experience throughout the Near East¹⁸. He also chaired the Department of Anthropology and Ethnic Studies²¹. He has dug in Cyprus, the Near East and the American Southwest, and his The Neolithic Revolution in the Near East won the G. Ernest Wright Book Award of the American Schools of Oriental Research³⁰. UNLV now lists him as Distinguished Professor Emeritus²².