Agrokipia Paleokamina

Agrokipia-Paleokamina is a scatter of chipped stone tools on a small hill near the village of Agrokipia, in Nicosia District, on the northern edge of the Troodos foothills. It was found by a field survey in 1993 and has never been excavated [1, p. 79]. Everything known about it comes from the stone tools and waste flakes picked up from the surface. Those tools have been dated only by their style, and the date has moved more than once: the most recent studies place the site among the earliest in inland Cyprus, in the centuries between the hunters of Akrotiri-Aetokremnos and the first farming villages of the Aceramic Neolithic, perhaps roughly 9800 to 8200 BC [1, p. 79; 2, p. 3].

A knoll above the Akaki valley

The scatter lies on the upper slopes of an eroding knoll overlooking a tributary of the Akaki river [2, p. 3], on a drainage of the Akaki in the northern Troodos [3, p. 98]. Paula Jones, following the survey report, describes the hill as a limestone hillock [1, p. 79]; Sandra Rosendahl calls the place an activity site "on a prominent hilltop overlooking a stream" [4, p. 335].

The position matters because of the stone. The early scatters of central Cyprus sit on hills, knolls and spurs in the river valleys along the junction of the Lefkara chalks and the pillow lavas of the Troodos fringe, where good chert outcrops [2, p. 3]. Rosendahl grouped Paleokamina with two nearby sites, Agrokipia-Kottafoi and Pera Chorio-Moutti, as places "ideally located to take advantage of the high-quality chert extractable without much effort from veins and outcrops" [4, p. 335].

Survey and re-survey

The site was recorded by the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project, the regional survey directed by Michael Given and A. Bernard Knapp, as site SCY102 [5]. The survey identified it as a possible Aceramic Neolithic site and read it, provisionally, as a place where tools were made [1, p. 79].

In 2003 Carole McCartney went back to the hill, collected again and studied the chipped stone. She confirmed the survey's reading of a temporary activity site, used by groups of foragers rather than lived in [1, p. 79; 6, p. 16]. The site was then taken into the Elaborating Early Neolithic Cyprus project (EENC), run by McCartney with Sturt Manning and colleagues, which surveyed the early sites of the region and reported on Paleokamina in 2006 [7, pp. 43–46]. The same project went on to excavate Ayia Varvara-Asprokremnos, further east; of the early sites in this part of the island, only Asprokremnos has been excavated, and the others are known from survey alone [2, p. 3].

The stone tools

The collection is made up mostly of flakes, with small tools among them: the EENC team describe a "microlithic flake-based" industry [2, p. 3]. Unusually for a flake-based site, it also has a sizeable component of ground stone, which is more common at the later, blade-based sites of the period [2, p. 3]. McCartney and her colleagues divided the early scatters of central Cyprus into two groups: flake-based ones such as Paleokamina and Pera Chorio-Moutti, which have parallels at the Late Epipalaeolithic coastal sites, and blade-based ones such as Asprokremnos [3, p. 98]. Rosendahl, reporting the same work, wrote that the flake industry at Paleokamina "strongly resembles mainland Epipalaeolithic technology as well as showing links to the industry at Aetokremnos" [4, p. 335].

The best-known pieces are small geometric tools with both ends cut off square, double truncations. McCartney noted "a significant number" of them at Paleokamina, made mostly on segments of blades and bladelets, and selectively on a high-quality red-brown translucent chert. She called them trapezes and suggested a possible link with Anatolia [8, p. 112].

McCartney has suggested that the tools from Paleokamina, like those from Politiko-Kelaidhoni, may represent temporary activity sites used by foragers, while the more substantial material at Asprokremnos could indicate a semi-permanent camp [3, p. 100].

Dating by the stone tools

No organic material from Paleokamina has been dated. The site is dated by comparing its tools with those from excavated and radiocarbon-dated sites, and as the excavated sequence has grown, the comparison has given different answers. Knapp warned that deflated surface scatters of this kind are hard to date [3, p. 100]. The successive datings are set out below.

The survey assigned the site broadly to the Aceramic Neolithic, and in 2004 McCartney placed it in the middle phase of that period. After the re-survey McCartney moved it to the gap between Aetokremnos and Kalavasos-Tenta Period 5, about 9800 to 8200 BC, stressing that this rested on typology and not on absolute dates [1, p. 79]. Knapp put it no more strongly than that "we can at least postulate" that Paleokamina and the similar scatters belong to the time of the Cypro-PPNA [3, p. 104]. On this page we use McCartney's window of about 9800 to 8200 BC for the site's dates, as a range that the tools suggest and that excavation or radiocarbon dating has not tested.

Paleokamina among the early sites of Cyprus

If the later datings are right, Paleokamina is one of a small group of inland sites that show people working the chert of the Troodos foothills well before the first farming villages. Most of these sites are known only from the surface. The map shows Paleokamina and its neighbour Kottafoi with the excavated sites that frame the discussion of their date.

Map of Cyprus

• Survey scatters near Agrokipia
• Excavated early sites
• Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

N

50 km

Sites on this map

1. 1Agrokipia Paleokamina
2. 2Agrokipia Kottafoi
3. 3Akrotiri-Aetokremnos
4. 4Ayia Varvara-Asprokremnos
5. 5Ayios Tychonas-Klimonas (approx.)
6. 6Parekklisha-Shillourokambos (approx.)
7. 7Kalavasos-Tenta

The site today

There is nothing to see on the ground: the site is a thin scatter of worked stone on an open hillside, and no features have been recorded.