Chlorakas-Palloures

Chlorakas-Palloures is a Chalcolithic village on the western edge of Chlorakas, about 3 km north of Paphos. People lived here in the Middle and Late Chalcolithic, roughly from 3400 to 2400 BC, in round houses built on a slope below a limestone outcrop, looking over the coastal plain to the sea [1, p. 468; 2, p. 166]. Since 2015 a rescue excavation by Leiden University and the Department of Antiquities has uncovered the remains of fifteen buildings, among them a round building 14 m across, the largest yet known from the Late Chalcolithic of Cyprus, and a storage jar holding the oldest securely dated copper axe from the island [2, pp. 170, 172, 177, 179]. The locality is also called Vrysoudhia, "small springs" [2, p. 167].

A terrace edge above the Ktima lowlands

Palloures is one of a line of Chalcolithic settlements spaced along the escarpment that overlooks the coastal plain north of Paphos. Lemba-Lakkous lies about 1 km away as the crow flies, and beyond it are Kissonerga-Mosphilia and Kissonerga-Mylouthkia (see Kissonerga) [2, p. 166]. Together they belong to the Ktima lowlands, a well-watered strip of low ground between Kouklia and Paliokastro, where the Chalcolithic villages stood on raised ground about 1.5 km apart [1, p. 468; 3, p. 12].

The village sat directly below a limestone outcrop, close to the sea, with the coastal lowland below it and terraces rising behind. Rainfall here in the later 20th century was about 300 to 400 mm a year, enough for crops without irrigation, and the uplands were probably partly wooded in the Chalcolithic, a source of timber and cover for deer [2, pp. 166–167]. No river runs close by. A well is reported at the spot, and the local name Vrysoudhia suggests that springs supplied the village's water [2, p. 167].

The surveyors of the 1950s found a thin scatter of artefacts over about 3 ha of hill slope, then under melons and vines, downslope from a spring. That made it one of the larger sites of the group, though much smaller than Kissonerga-Mosphilia [1, p. 468]. After the terracing of the 1970s, finds were spread over an estimated 5 ha [1, p. 469].

Discovery, damage and rescue

Archaeologists first recorded the site in the 1950s, and it was studied in the Pafos District Survey [3, p. 12; 1, p. 468]. In the mid-1970s a land-consolidation programme merged the fields, cut roads through the site and terraced the hill, pushing soil downslope. When Edgar Peltenburg visited in 1977 he saw many more artefacts than before, traces of the walls of circular buildings, and plastered and pebble-paved surfaces [1, pp. 468–469]. In the 1980s deeper terracing and imported soil prepared the ground for a banana plantation, abandoned about ten years later. From the 1990s building and road works cut into the edges of the site; deep digging for one basement near the main coastal road hit two round houses and about five burials, which Paul Croft of the Lemba research centre tried in vain to save, and no record of them exists [1, p. 469].

The Lemba Archaeological Project surveyed the surface several times and collected 12,122 sherds. Among the identifiable wares were Red-on-White (9.4%), Red Monochrome (22.5%) and Red and Black Stroke-Burnished (11.2%), which dated the village to the Middle and Late Chalcolithic. The chipped stone showed every stage of tool making and a good supply of Moni chert [1, p. 469].

In late 2013 Peltenburg suggested to Bleda S. Düring of Leiden University that the threatened site should be excavated, and Düring met the Department of Antiquities in Nicosia that December [2, p. 167]. The Department wanted plot 568 investigated before it was built on. Its owners refused access, so the plot was expropriated for three years, from 2015 to 2017, and a Leiden University expedition directed by Düring carried out the work in consultation with the Department [1, pp. 467–468; 2, p. 167]. The first season, from 10 July to 10 August 2015, opened six trenches of 5 by 10 m with a team of 24 and added a drone survey and a ground-penetrating radar survey by Till Sonnemann [1, pp. 468, 470]. The team was based at the Edgar Peltenburg Archaeological Research Centre at Lemba, and a study season followed in 2018 [2, p. 196].

Phases and dates

The excavators date the Middle Chalcolithic of this region to about 3400 to 2900 BC and the Late Chalcolithic to about 2800 to 2400 BC [1, p. 468]. Of a sample of 5,497 sherds from the 2015 season, about 48% were Middle Chalcolithic and 27% Late Chalcolithic. Pottery of the Early Chalcolithic or Late Neolithic made up less than 1%, Roman sherds about 3%, and there was no pottery of the Philia phase or the Early Bronze Age [1, p. 477]. The Middle Chalcolithic pottery falls into an earlier and a later group that match periods 3A and 3B at Kissonerga-Mosphilia [1, p. 477].

Radiocarbon dates from 2015 to 2017 range from about 3080 BC, for a surface in the southern trenches, to the first half of the third millennium BC [2, pp. 171, 173, 177–178]. A midden in trenches BW14 and BX14 gave a stratified sequence running from Middle into Late Chalcolithic deposits. At Lemba and Kissonerga that transition had been thought to fall in a gap between the two periods, and the excavators count this evidence among the main results of the project [2, pp. 176, 196].

Phases

1. Middle Chalcolithicc. 3400–2900 BC

   Round houses on the southern slope, among them the stone-built Building 12, the site's only certain Middle Chalcolithic building so far. Burials among the house deposits in trench BU13.

2. Middle to Late Chalcolithicc. 2900 BC

   A midden in trenches BW14 and BX14 runs without a break from one period into the next.

3. Late Chalcolithicc. 2800–2400 BC

   Building 1 is built in the north, its roof post dated to between about 2875 and 2665 BC. In the south, Building 6 rises inside Building 5; the jar with the copper axe stands on its floor.

4. Abandonmentby c. 2400 BC

   No pottery of the Philia phase or the Early Bronze Age has been found.

5. FieldsHellenistic to modern

   Hellenistic pits and stone packings in eroded gullies, probably when the slope was first turned into farmland. Roman, Byzantine and modern finds.

Later people left only light traces. In the Hellenistic period pits were dug and a small wall built in the north, and gullies in the southern trenches were packed with stones, probably to consolidate fields. Roman, Byzantine and modern material also turned up [2, pp. 175, 182, 188]. A single stone vessel rim of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic came from slopewash, with no sign of activity of that date in place [2, p. 188].

The excavated plot

In 2015 to 2017 the team opened 17 trenches of 5 by 10 m, about 810 m², or about 16% of plot 568. Archaeological deposits survive only along Marathonos Road, on the south-west side of the plot, an area of about 1,000 m² of which about two-thirds was excavated; on the eastern side bulldozers had cut the ground down to bedrock. In places the deposits are more than 2 m deep, and mostly only their upper levels have been dug so far [2, p. 168]. The trenches uncovered the remains of fifteen buildings in two areas. Five, numbered 1 to 4 and 21, lie in a northern area of seven trenches; ten, numbered 5 to 14, lie in a southern area of ten trenches, of which the three upslope ones held nothing but a single burial. More of the settlement surely lies unexcavated between the two areas [2, pp. 168, 170, 177].

No plan of the whole village exists. What is known comes from the excavated part of plot 568, a small part of a settlement that once covered several hectares.

Plan · Middle and Late Chalcolithic, c. 3400 to 2400 BC

The excavated plot at Chlorakas-Palloures

Chlorakas-Palloures, plot 568 beside Marathonos Road

45 mMarathonos RoadBP08BR10BR11BV11BU12BZ12BT13BU13BV13BX13BY13BW14BX1412345678910

010 m

Scale bar: 10 metres.

Choose a number on the plan, or a name below, to read what was found there and how well it is known.

1. 1Building 1
2. 2Building 4
3. 3Buildings 2, 3 and 21
4. 4Buildings 5 and 6, and the jar
5. 5Building 7
6. 6Building 12
7. 7Buildings 8 to 11 and 14
8. 8Building 13
9. 9Burials
10. 10Marathonos Road and the bulldozed ground

Key

• Wall, as excavated
• Floor
• Hearth or other feature
• Edge of the bedrock (bulldozed beyond)
• Modern road cut
• Line of a round house, from its published diameter
• Burial
• Marathonos Road
• Trench, 2015 to 2017
• Contours at 1 m (modern ground)

Building 1

Building 1, in the northern area, measures 14 m in outer diameter, with a wall about 1 m thick, faced on both sides with larger and flatter stones than any other building on the site. The excavators call it "the largest and most impressive building discovered thus far in Late Chalcolithic Cyprus"; buildings of similar size are known only from the Middle Chalcolithic levels at Kissonerga-Mosphilia [2, p. 172]. A charred roof post gave a radiocarbon date between about 2875 and 2665 BC, early in the Late Chalcolithic [2, p. 173]. Its builders levelled the bedrock and filled the pits and hollows below before laying the first course of the wall [2, p. 172].

The entrance, in the south-east, was paved with large flagstones. A well-made floor ran over them into the building and out in front of it, where the plastered surface probably lay under a covered porch. The outer floor stood 40 cm higher than the inner one, so the threshold sloped steeply inwards. Rubbish had been trodden into the outside plaster, including many pig jawbones pressed in with their teeth upwards [2, pp. 170, 172]. A pivot stone set in the floor to the right of the doorway shows that the door swung inwards to the right [2, p. 173].

In the middle stood a round hearth platform 2.5 m across, built of cobbles and clay with a white plastered top. It held two clay fire bowls, the first exactly in the centre and the second added beside it, and post and stake holes round it probably held up the roof [2, p. 173]. On the floor lay two long, smooth boulders of diabase, with a large mortar with two hollows sunk into the ground beside them; the floor plaster runs up to all three, so they were fixed parts of the room. Their use is unclear. The mortar resembles an installation in the Late Chalcolithic Pithos House at Kissonerga-Mosphilia that has been read as an olive press [2, p. 173]. One of the boulders shows polish and light use as an anvil, and a very large stone vessel was built into the wall [2, p. 190].

Walls and floor were coated with white plaster. Under the microscope the floor turned out to be crushed local havara limestone, about 2 cm thick and more poorly made than the floors at Kissonerga-Mosphilia, with no sign of renewal [2, p. 173]. A white building of this size at the edge of the village "would probably have been clearly visible from afar" [2, p. 174]. Later the building was used again, with patches of burnt clay floor laid over a layer of collapse, and on that collapse lay three complete deer antlers, perhaps once fixed to the wall or roof [2, pp. 172, 174]. In a notch in the wall east of the entrance, above the pivot stone, someone had tucked eight large flakes of Moni chert, 55 to 125 mm long, brought from a distance: a store of blanks or a ritual deposit [2, p. 193].

The excavators note that Building 1 "may not represent an average domestic unit" [2, p. 190]. Its scale has no parallel in the Late Chalcolithic, and they suggest that elaborating a house may have mattered in competition between households, as it already did in the Middle Chalcolithic at Kissonerga-Mosphilia [2, p. 196; 4]. The Pithos House at Kissonerga-Mosphilia, where the comparable installation was found, is the subject of one of our reconstructions.

Reconstruction · Building · Late Chalcolithic

The Pithos House at Kissonerga

c. 2700–2500 BC

A large Late Chalcolithic round house of stone at Kissonerga, burnt with its stores inside: some thirty-seven storage jars, about 4,000 litres, on stands along its walls and loose across its floor.

Formats: Measured drawings · 3D model · Build sequence · Guided tour

Houses on the southern slope

The southern trenches exposed ten buildings. Seven are ordinary round houses with circular stone footings that once carried walls of mud; Buildings 13 and 14 had no stone footings, and Building 13 was dug into the ground. The houses were built against bedrock that slopes south-west at up to 45 degrees, often cut into the rock on the uphill side, which protected their upper walls. Younger houses moved downslope and robbed the walls of older ones, and in trenches BX13 and BX14 five buildings lie one over another [2, p. 177].

Building 7 is the best preserved, 5.4 m across, with several floors, postholes, plastered pits, pot stands and hearths, a raised central hearth and two possible doorways [2, pp. 177–178]. A pit in its northern part held 81 ground stone objects together with raw material and a picrolite blank, "the highest number of ground stone objects found from a discrete Late Chalcolithic context", many of them complete; it may have been a store for a workshop [2, pp. 178, 189]. Four complete antlers lay in the collapse of this house too [2, p. 178].

Building 5, cut into the bedrock, measured about 8 m across, its well-built wall standing four courses high. On its compact earth floor, round a plastered raised hearth, lay a cluster of ground stone tools, among them a skittle-shaped pestle about 47 cm long, the largest stratified example of its type. It has no traces of use and was probably too large to work with: the excavators see it as a prestige object [2, pp. 178, 186]. Building 6 was later built inside Building 5, about 5.6 m across, with a poorer wall that probably reused stones from its predecessor [2, p. 179].

Building 12, in trench BU13, was built entirely of stone. Its wall survives up to eight courses and 80 cm high, it measures about 5 m across, and it may originally have been roofed like a tholos. It is the only building on the site so far that is certainly Middle Chalcolithic [2, pp. 177, 181–182].

Reconstruction · Building · Middle Chalcolithic

A Chalcolithic Round House, Layer by Layer

c. 3500–2900 BC

A middling Middle Chalcolithic house of the Paphos lowlands: one round room on a low stone footing, with walls of mud and a flat roof, rebuilt from the excavated houses of Kissonerga and Lemba.

Formats: Measured drawings · 3D model · Build sequence · Guided tour

A copper axe in a storage jar

A large necked jar with three lugs at the base of its collar lay on its side close to the surface, partly shaved off by the plough. It was probably standing upright on the floor of Building 6, set into a cut in a lime-plastered surface as a dug-in store [3, p. 14; 2, p. 179]. Its closest parallels are Late Chalcolithic jars from Kalavasos-Pamboules [2, p. 179].

Inside were hooks cut from pig tusks, probably fish-hooks (four were described in 2018, five are counted in the final report), a large, flat stone axe or adze, and a small copper axe or adze [3, pp. 14, 17; 2, p. 179]. All of these are unique or rare in Chalcolithic Cyprus [3, p. 14]. The copper axe is about 7.5 cm long and weighs 119 g. It is 99.5% copper with a trace of tin, which does not occur in Cypriot copper ores and shows that at least part of its metal came from outside the island [3, pp. 18–20]. A charred barley grain from the soil in the jar gave a radiocarbon date of about 2600 BC, so the axe is at least that old [3, p. 17]. Until it was found, the earliest confirmed copper axes on Cyprus came from the Philia phase, about 2450 to 2250 BC [3, pp. 12, 18]. The final report calls it "the oldest securely dated copper axe known from Cyprus" [2, p. 179].

The stone axe resembles the copper one closely in its thickness, its trapezoidal body and its square butt, and is unused. The excavators take it as support for an older idea, put forward by Peltenburg, that Chalcolithic stoneworkers in south-west Cyprus copied metal axes, by about 2600 BC at the latest [3, p. 18]. Two small copper ornaments also come from the site, a partly unrolled spiral about 4 cm long and part of a snake-shaped or spiral pendant, both with close parallels at Souskiou-Laona [3, p. 19].

Lead isotope analysis of corrosion products from the three copper objects, carried out with Vasiliki Kassianidou, showed that their metal "match[es] only with Anatolian ores, and a Cypriot origin of the copper can be excluded" [5, p. 678]. The copper of the earliest securely dated axe from Cyprus was therefore imported. How the objects came to be left in the jar is unknown: a hasty departure is one possibility, though no burning or other sign of disaster was found, and a deliberate cache is another [3, p. 14]. For the excavators the finds show that metal objects of some size already mattered to Chalcolithic communities [2, p. 196]. More on the island's first metal is in Copper metallurgy.

Burials

The 2015 to 2017 seasons found 15 burials, holding at least 17 individuals. Not all are complete: one is a single articulated hand, others only skull fragments or a jawbone, probably from graves disturbed by later pits; there is no evidence that bones were taken out and handled on purpose [2, p. 182]. Most burials were at the edge of the settlement, dug into the bedrock or the sediments above it, with seven in trench BX13. A second group lay among the house deposits in trench BU13: two infants, a middle-aged woman, the hand and a jawbone [2, pp. 182–183].

The dead were laid in pits, flexed, on their right or left side. Capstones covered some of the pits, probably to mark them or to allow later burials in the same grave. No grave goods were found in any burial [2, p. 183]. Six of the 17 individuals were infants under three, and just over half died before the age of 18. Of the eight adults and older adolescents, four were women or probably women and the sex of the other four could not be determined; no men were identified. Both patterns match the burials at Lemba-Lakkous and Kissonerga-Mosphilia [2, p. 183]. Why adult men are missing from these villages is not yet known. Few diseases could be recognised in such broken bones: a young woman had gum disease and a worn spine, and the middle-aged woman of BU13 had probably broken her right wrist, which healed well [2, pp. 183–184]. For burial in this period across the island, see Neolithic and Chalcolithic burial.

Stone tools, figurines and ornaments

The 2015 to 2017 seasons produced 1,180 ground stone objects, most of them tools [2, pp. 184–185]. Compared with three other Chalcolithic sites, the 2015 assemblage had fewer chopping tools and more pounding tools [1, pp. 477–478]. The forms are the familiar Chalcolithic ones: axes, oversized and miniature axes, adzes, cigar-shaped chisels and skittle-shaped pestles [2, p. 186]. A chisel of an unusual white stone, perhaps chalcedony, was probably chosen for its looks, although it would break more easily than the usual igneous stones [2, p. 187].

The figurines and ornaments are of stone. There are finely made cruciform figurines of picrolite and rough "gingerbread man" figures of calcarenite with close parallels in period 3B at Kissonerga-Mosphilia [2, pp. 186–187]. A small cruciform of dark green picrolite is of a type found at Souskiou but not clearly at Lemba or Kissonerga, and other ornaments also have Souskiou parallels [2, p. 187]. Two pieces have no known match: the head of a picrolite figurine, carved more in the round than most, with nose and hair in relief and simple outlined eyes, and a headless picrolite animal pierced to hang as a pendant [2, p. 187; 1, p. 477]. More on these stones is in Neolithic and picrolite figurines.

About 8,000 pieces of chipped stone were found, of which 4,365 were analysed. Nearly half are of Moni chert, a third of Lefkara basal chert and the rest of translucent cherts [2, p. 191]. Moni chert was valued in the Chalcolithic [1, p. 468]. It is common at Souskiou-Laona, near its source, and rare at Lemba and Kissonerga-Mosphilia, so its abundance here cannot be explained by distance alone; it suggests a tie with the Souskiou area or a preference for the scrapers made from it [2, p. 190].

Pottery and contacts

The pottery is of the usual south-western kinds. The Late Chalcolithic red and black wares are almost identical across the lowland villages, and small amounts of types at home on the north and south coasts, as at Vasilikos and Erimi, show contacts beyond the region [1, p. 477]. The project records its pottery in a new system of attribute groups that departs from the typologies used at Lemba and Kissonerga [1, pp. 475–477]; the full study is being published by Charalambos Paraskeva [2, p. 166]. The fabrics of the Late Chalcolithic pottery from Palloures and its neighbours have been studied by Maria Hadjigavriel and Maria Dikomitou Eliadou [6]. For the wares of the period, see Neolithic and Chalcolithic wares.

Pottery from other parts of the island, the large amount of Moni chert and the imported copper together show that the village took part in exchange across Cyprus and beyond [2, p. 196; 5, p. 678].

Animals and food

Hunted fallow deer and herded pigs supplied most of the meat. Together they make up 84% of the identified bone fragments and 88% of the bone by weight; pig bones are more numerous, but deer, being larger, outweigh them. Goats outnumber sheep about two to one, and fox, dog and cat are also present [2, p. 194]. Antler, not counted in the table, weighs over 4 kg [2, p. 194].

The sea contributed little: eight fish bones, two claws of the warty crab and a bone of a marine turtle. One of the crab claws was ground down at both ends so that it could be threaded as a bead, perhaps a unique object. Eight claws of the freshwater crab, three of them burnt, show that river crabs were cooked [2, pp. 194–195]. The few bird bones include stork, crane, wood pigeon, crow and redwing [2, p. 194]. The mix of animals is close to that at Lemba-Lakkous and the Kissonerga sites, where deer and pig together make up 77 to 87% of the main animals [2, p. 195].

Excavations since 2017

The Republic of Cyprus has been acquiring two of the plots on the site, so that work can continue [2, p. 196], and excavation has gone on under Düring's direction, with researchers of the University of Cyprus also taking part [7; 8]. The Department of Antiquities reported on the 2022 season a building with walls standing up to 1 m high that had been destroyed by an intense fire, with complete vessels, querns and mortars on its floor; large storage vessels were taken to the Paphos District Museum [7]. Its report on 2024 describes more burnt round houses with collapsed complete vessels, the burial of a child of about six, two more copper objects (a pendant and a chisel) and about 30 coprolites [8]. These results are preliminary and not yet published in full.

Visiting

The site is an excavation in a built-up part of Chlorakas, on Marathonos Road, and is not laid out for visitors. Finds from the excavations, including the large storage vessels from the 2022 season, have gone to the Paphos District Museum [7; 2, p. 196].