Agrokipia Kottafoi

Agrokipia-Kottafoi (also written Kottaphi) is a scatter of chipped stone near the village of Agrokipia in Nicosia District, on the northern edge of the Troodos foothills. It is one of several small sites reported in 2006 by the Elaborating Early Neolithic Cyprus project (EENC), which looked for the camps of early foragers along the Troodos foothills [1, p. 335; 2; 3, p. 79]. It has never been excavated. In the literature it appears only as a name, and we know of no published description of its setting, its tools or its date.

What is recorded

Two works name the site. Sandra Rosendahl, writing about the EENC survey, grouped "Palaeokamina, Agrokipia Kottaphi and Pera Chorio Moutti" as sites of the northern Troodos foothills that represent "a second step in the Landscape Learning process", her term for the way the first settlers came to know the island, and wrote that "these sites are ideally located to take advantage of the high-quality chert extractable without much effort from veins and outcrops" [1, p. 335]. She cited the EENC report of 2006 [2] as her source. Christine Winkelmann, in her study of Neolithic figurines, lists Agrokipia-Kottafoi among the lithic scatter sites of the region that have not been intensively investigated [4, p. 24].

The site is not among the early survey sites of central Cyprus tabulated by Sarah Stewart and her colleagues in 2020, a list that does include its neighbour Paleokamina [5, p. 3]. That study does not explain the omission.

Dating

Kottafoi has no date of its own. The grouping with Paleokamina and Moutti implies that its stone tools were thought to resemble theirs. For the dates shown on this page we use the range proposed for Agrokipia-Paleokamina after its re-survey in 2003, about 9800 to 8200 BC, which rests on the style of the tools alone [3, p. 79]. It should be read as the date of the group, which Kottafoi is assumed to share, and the attribution may change when the survey material from Kottafoi is published in full.

Neighbouring sites

The first site Rosendahl named with it is Agrokipia-Paleokamina, a flake-based scatter on a knoll above a tributary of the Akaki river, which has been studied in more detail and is described on its own page. The one early site in this part of the island to have been excavated is Ayia Varvara-Asprokremnos, further east [5, p. 3].

The site today

There is nothing to see. The site is a surface scatter in open country and no features have been recorded.