Carole McCartney

The flint and chert from two of the oldest known settlements on Cyprus passed through the hands of Carole McCartney, who wrote the chipped-stone report for Kalavasos-Tenta and was first-named author of the preliminary reports on the excavation of Ayia Varvara-Asprokremnos. She took her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1996, with a thesis on variability in simple core technologies in Levantine assemblages that post-date the Pre-Pottery Neolithic¹⁰. Her birth and early life are not recorded.

Her earliest Cyprus publication is a 1998 preliminary report in Levant on the chipped stone from Ayia Varvara-Asprokremnos, which she described as an Aceramic Neolithic site¹. In the same year she was listed among the authors of the Lemba Archaeological Project volume on the excavations at Kissonerga-Mosphilia, edited by Edgar J. Peltenburg⁹. When she published a survey article in 2008 she gave her affiliation as the Lemba Archaeological Research Centre in the Paphos District³.

The Tenta chipped stone

With Ian A. Todd she wrote the chipped-stone report for Kalavasos-Tenta, published in 2005 in the second Tenta volume of the Vasilikos Valley Project². A 1998 thesis reports, on the word of a colleague, that she had already placed the earliest occupation at Tenta in the eighth or seventh millennium BC¹⁰. On the evidence of the Tenta Period 5 industry she proposed a phase not yet documented on the island, lying between the Epipalaeolithic Akrotiri phase and the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic B¹³. Clarke and Wasse report that she revised her reading of Tenta 5 once Klimonas and Asprokremnos had been discovered¹³.

Asprokremnos and the EENC project

In the middle of the 2000s the Elaborating Early Neolithic Cyprus (EENC) project re-examined Asprokremnos. Its work led to the recognition of a Cypro-PPNA phase and of the Kourka chipped-stone scatters¹⁶. McCartney is the first-named author of the project's preliminary reports in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus: the 2006 season with Sturt W. Manning, D. Sewell and S. T. Stewart⁴; the 2008 season with Paul Croft, Manning and S. Rosendahl⁵; and the 2009 season with Manning and Stewart, which added radiocarbon dating and geochemical analyses of chert sources⁶. A later publication with Sorrentino, cited in Maritime Narratives of Prehistoric Cyprus, treats Asprokremnos as a place where ochre and other pigments may have been exploited systematically, in part for export to the Levantine mainland¹⁷.

Surveys and later work

In 2008 she and Louise Steel published a preliminary analysis of the surface material from Aredhiou-Vouppes (Lithosouros), a Late Bronze Age agricultural settlement identified in 1993³. She is also a co-author, with N. Efstratiou, P. Karkanas and D. Kyriakou, of the report on the third season, in 2011, at Vretsia-Roudias, a Late Epipalaeolithic camp site in the upland Troodos⁷.

The latest publication carrying her name is a 2022 study of virtual sea-drifting between Cyprus and the surrounding mainland in the early Holocene, by Phaedon Kyriakidis and others, which gives her affiliation as the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus. The article was received in May 2022, and a note beside her name reads "This author passed away"⁸. The date of her death is not given.