Edgar J. Peltenburg

Vrysi lies on the north coast, 11 km east of Kyrenia, and a survey in 1969 found sherds there with painted designs thought to be earlier than Sotira³⁵. From 1 to 20 September 1969 a University of Birmingham team led by P. S. Gelling and Dr E. G. Peltenburg uncovered buildings there in trial excavations³⁶. In his own account, the programme then grew beyond a limited rescue season to analyse the evolution of a Cypriot Neolithic settlement³⁵. By 1972 the mission was the University of Glasgow's, headed by Peltenburg, and the 1973 season, five weeks of digging and a week of field survey in Kyrenia district, ended on 10 August^37,38.

His 1975 report describes eighteen structures, many rebuilt two or three times, with winding passages and open yards, set in such deep artificial hollows that the settlement "may be considered as partly subterranean"³⁵. He argued that the links between Vrysi and other excavated sites called for a reassessment of the island's prehistory in the fifth and fourth millennia, which seemed to be marked by cultural continuity, regionalism and isolation³⁵. Gordon Thomas credits the excavations with "exceptionally well-preserved and unique domestic architecture" and with showing regionally divergent cultures across the island in the pottery Neolithic².

Writing in 1982, in words that Müge Hüseyin Şevketoğlu quotes in her 1998 survey of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites of Kyrenia district, he recalled that the intended 1974 season at Vrysi "began inauspiciously with the greeting 'We have a revolution'!"³⁹. Neither that season nor the study season planned for 1975 took place³⁹. Şevketoğlu adds that the project was then discontinued and that he did not study the survey or excavation material in detail³⁹.

Thomas Kiely writes that the policy of Vassos Karageorghis of finding new sites for foreign excavators displaced by "the tragic events of 1974" led to a concentration of at least formally British projects around Lemba and Kissonerga⁴. In 1976 the Glasgow mission that had dug at Ayios Epiktitos began a new excavation at Lemba under his direction⁶. That year he founded the Lemba Archaeological Project, which Thomas says revealed the previously little-known Chalcolithic period of Cypriot prehistory². Philip writes that he often worked in the district with his partner and fellow archaeologist Diane Bolger¹.

In the trial excavations of 1976 the team was, in his words, "fortunate enough to discover a unique figurine"⁴⁰. It lay beneath a storage jar that had fallen against a plastered wall, and he first dated the level by its associated objects to the middle of the third millennium BC⁴⁰. He proposed that the building "may therefore best be interpreted as a sacred place", and the pendants from ordinary houses and graves as commonly produced replicas of such cult figures⁴⁰. The date was later revised: the Getty catalogue of 1990, Cyprus Before the Bronze Age, lists the 36 cm limestone figure as Middle Chalcolithic and shows her in situ against the back wall of Building 1 at Lemba-Lakkous, "circa 3000 B.C."⁴¹. Caubet says the idol was at once nicknamed Mabel and that she is now, with the Kissonerga building model and the large painted figure from Mosphilia, one of the stars of the Nicosia museum².

In August to October 1987 an Edinburgh team under Peltenburg dug a fourth season at Kissonerga-Mosphilia⁴². One deposit held a stack of four Red-on-White bowls, nine terracotta and ten stone figurines, a terracotta stool, a triton shell and stone tools, 56 recorded objects in all, and the report reads one vessel as a model of an unconventional building, anticipating by a millennium the "sanctuary" model of Vounous⁴². In 1988 the model and its figurines were given a special display in the first gallery of the Cyprus Museum⁴³. The next year members of the mission built an experimental circular house of Chalcolithic type at Lemba⁴⁴.

Philip remembers the early Lemba seasons as run on a shoestring, fuelled by bread and beans "in a red gloop that grew ever-thinner" as the funds wore out¹. Kiely calls the results of the work in the Lemba-Kissonerga area "nothing short of revolutionary" for the understanding of the island's prehistory⁴. Jennifer Webb credited him with the "almost single-handed construction of a social archaeology for the Cypriot Chalcolithic"³⁴.

From 1989 the project kept a watching brief at the coastal site of Kissonerga-Mylouthkia, investigating features exposed by quarrying and development⁴⁵. They proved to be Aceramic Neolithic: five water wells, three of them excavated, a semi-subterranean curvilinear structure and three pits⁴⁵. The 4.50 m of fill cleared by 1995 in the second well held the scattered bones of an estimated five people and goat remains apparently put in as whole skeletons⁴⁶.

In 2001 Peltenburg and his co-authors wrote that the well fills gave "startling new evidence" for human occupation of the island in the 10th and 9th millennia BP, and that immigrant groups with links to the later Khirokitian had colonised Cyprus long before that classic phase⁴⁷. In a second paper that year they held that one of the two Cypro-EPPNB sites had the earliest water well then known anywhere in the world, though it was impossible to say which, and that Mylouthkia alone "arguably" gave the earliest evidence for water divining⁴⁵. Thomas credits him and his team with identifying the early Aceramic Neolithic Cypro-PPNB, "thereby solving the mystery of the first Neolithic occupation of the island"².

The Lemba Archaeological Research Centre and the Department of Antiquities dug the Chalcolithic cemetery of Souskiou-Vathyrkakas together in 1991 and 1994–97, and Kiely writes that this work began a broader programme at the nearby settlement of Laona⁴. In 2012 Peltenburg wrote that the custom of placing the dead in separate cemeteries is first attested at Souskiou⁴⁸. Because the Laona cemetery had been extensively looted, the team expected to spend one or two seasons recording empty tombs, but many partly looted tombs still held intact burial deposits²⁸. What had been regarded as a short-term rescue operation became a research excavation of 11 field seasons (2001–2011) and four seasons of post-excavation work (2012–2015)²⁸. The team recorded some 137 tombs, and he wrote that the picrolite wasters found throughout the settlement meant that most households made figurines⁴⁸.

In the final report, Figurine Makers of Prehistoric Cyprus (2019), Diane Bolger and Lindy Crewe call Souskiou the site in Cyprus closest to his heart²⁸. Despite his illness, they write, he completed all but the concluding chapter of the volume in the final months of his life²⁸.

The sources disagree on when he moved from Glasgow to Edinburgh, 1978 or 1975: Philip and Thomas's tribute on the University of Edinburgh website give 1978, while the version of the same tribute printed with Caubet's introduction gives 1975^1,2,49. He was given a personal chair in 1994 and retired in 2007¹. Philip writes that, working with Watkins through the 1980s and 1990s, he built the department into "a major international player in Near Eastern archaeology"¹. Kiely says he made Edinburgh one of the few places in the United Kingdom where the archaeology of Cyprus could be studied in any depth⁴. Among his doctoral students were Louise Maguire and Lindy Crewe^4,34. In 1988 Edinburgh hosted a conference on early Cyprus to accompany an exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland curated by Elisabeth Goring⁴.

In 1992 his interest in the rise of early states took him to Jerablus Tahtani, on the Syrian-Turkish border, which Thomas says was founded with the late fourth-millennium Uruk expansion and became, in the later third millennium BC, the fortified seat of a small kingdom or state². He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Societies of Antiquaries of London and of Scotland, and a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences². As Emeritus Professor he stayed involved in research and teaching at Edinburgh until he died on 14 August 2016, aged 74, after a short illness^1,2. The Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute awards an annual postdoctoral fellowship in Cypriot prehistory in his honour⁵⁰.