Chalcolithic Cyprus

Digging a deep sounding at Erimi between 1933 and 1935, Porphyrios Dikaios recovered the tip of a copper chisel from a little over two metres down. It was the first Chalcolithic metal object ever found in Cyprus [1, p. 44], and on the strength of it and a few other small finds of copper the whole age came to be called Chalcolithic, the "copper-stone" age. Hans-Günter Buchholz and Vassos Karageorghis judged later that the chisel, "although ... probably imported", proved the name right [2, p. 133].

The name fits the period poorly. In the 1,500 years from about 3900 to 2500 BC the people of Cyprus used probably less than a kilogram of copper in all, mostly as small spirals and beads, on an island later famous for its copper [3, pp. 279–280]. The largest metal object of the whole period, an axe found at Chlorakas-Palloures near Paphos, weighs 119 grams, and its copper came from Anatolia [4; 5, p. 678].

What the period has in quantity is other things: villages of round houses with plastered and painted floors, a bright painted pottery called Red-on-White, small figures of blue-green picrolite carved in the shape of a cross and worn on a cord, and at Souskiou the only known cemeteries of the age set apart from the houses of the living [6, p. 323]. Edgar Peltenburg, who led the excavations at Lemba, Kissonerga and Souskiou, called it "one of the most distinctive societies of prehistoric Cyprus" [7, p. 44].

The Chalcolithic at a glance

4000 BC3750 BC3500 BC3250 BC3000 BC2750 BC2500 BC2250 BC

Early

Middle Chalcolithicc. 3500–2850 BC

Late

Philia

Sotira-culture villages leftc. 4000 BCKalavasos-Ayious pits3750–3500 BCMylouthkia pits and huts3630–3380 BCErimi village foundedc. 3500 BCSouskiou-Laona village3300–2650 BCKissonerga great houses3200–2900 BCSouskiou cemeteries in usec. 3000 BCLemba and Kissonerga empty2900–2700 BCKokkinorotsos hunting camp2880–2670 BCPithos House, Kissonerga2700–2500 BCCopper axe cached, Pallouresc. 2600 BCLemba destroyed by firec. 2500 BCFirst cattle at Kissonergac. 2400 BC

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The Chalcolithic at a glance: phases

• Early Chalcolithic, c. 3900–3500 BC (boundary uncertain)
• Middle Chalcolithic, c. 3500–2850 BC (boundary uncertain)
• Late Chalcolithic, c. 2850–2450 BC (boundary uncertain)
• Philia phase (Bronze Age), c. 2500–2200 BC (boundary uncertain)

Events

• Sotira-culture villages left, c. 4000 BC
• Kalavasos-Ayious pits, 3750–3500 BC
• Mylouthkia pits and huts, 3630–3380 BC
• Erimi village founded, c. 3500 BC
• Souskiou-Laona village, 3300–2650 BC
• Kissonerga great houses, 3200–2900 BC
• Souskiou cemeteries in use, c. 3000 BC
• Lemba and Kissonerga empty, 2900–2700 BC
• Kokkinorotsos hunting camp, 2880–2670 BC
• Pithos House, Kissonerga, 2700–2500 BC
• Copper axe cached, Palloures, c. 2600 BC
• Lemba destroyed by fire, c. 2500 BC
• First cattle at Kissonerga, c. 2400 BC

Cyprus after the Neolithic villages

Around 4000 BC the villages of the Sotira culture, the last Neolithic way of life on the island, dwindled and were left. For a long time archaeologists read this as an island-wide abandonment followed by "an apparent gap in occupation of around 600 years", a picture that rested on a short series of radiocarbon dates, most of them from Ayios Epiktitos-Vrysi on the north coast [9, p. 83]. With calibrated dates the Chalcolithic itself also grew, in Peltenburg's words "much longer than Dikaios (1962) and others thought" [10, p. 17].

An older explanation for the break blamed an earthquake. Peltenburg found "little supporting evidence" for it [7, p. 44]. He looked instead to changes inside the island: communities splitting into smaller groups, and a drying climate that pushed people towards a more mobile life, with a heavy reliance on hunting fallow deer. Whatever the cause, he saw no sign of newcomers from abroad [7, p. 44].

The first Chalcolithic potters still favoured plain burnished wares: in the early pits at Kissonerga-Mylouthkia more than half of over 30,000 sherds are of a glossy burnished ware [11, ch. 14]. Two sherds in the Drakopoulos collection, probably of the Sotira culture, show the red-slipped pottery that came before.

• Red Lustrous Ware Body Sherd with Fire-Mottled SlipNeolithic · 4500–3900 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Red Slip Ware Body Sherd with Streaked SlipChalcolithic · 4500–3500 BCDrakopoulos collection

Dikaios called the new age the "Erimi culture", after his excavation, to follow his "Khirokitia" and "Sotira" cultures of the Neolithic; Louise Steel notes that the scheme "takes little account of cultural continuity, nor of internal regional variation" [9, p. 14]. About 80 sites of the "Erimi culture" were known by the end of the 1980s, though Bernard Knapp and his colleagues warned that they were unlikely to have been occupied all at once [12, p. 41].

Most of them were small. "Most surveyed sites of the period hardly attain 3 ha", Peltenburg wrote; Erimi at about 15 hectares and Kissonerga-Mosphilia at about 12 stand at the top of a shallow hierarchy, with Kissonerga-Mylouthkia at about 6 and Lemba at about 3 [10, pp. 17–19]. Only about a dozen sites have been dug in any depth, and nearly all of them lie in the south and south-west. The Kyrenia district in the north has been closed to fieldwork from the Republic's side since 1974, and "almost nothing is known outside of an intensively studied area in the south and southwest" [13, p. 94]. Most of what follows therefore comes from the west of the island.

Map of Cyprus

Chalcolithic sites in the story

• Early Chalcolithic pit site
• Villages and camps
• Souskiou, village and cemeteries
• Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

N

50 km

Sites on this map

1. 1Kissonerga-Mylouthkia (approx.)
2. 2Erimi-Pamboula (approx.)
3. 3Lemba-Lakkous
4. 4Kissonerga
5. 5Chlorakas-Palloures
6. 6Kythrea (approx.)
7. 7Lapithos
8. 8Ambelikou-Ayios Georghios (approx.)
9. 9Politiko-Kokkinorotsos (approx.)
10. 10Souskiou-Laona (approx.)
11. 11Souskiou-Vathyrkakas

Pits, tunnels and timber shelters in the Early Chalcolithic

In the autumn of 1978 the new Nicosia–Limassol highway was planned across a plateau due east of the Neolithic village of Kalavasos-Tenta. The Vasilikos Valley Project under Ian Todd began rescue soundings there that year and excavated the site, Kalavasos-Ayious, in full in 1979 and 1980, with Paul Croft supervising most of the work. What survived is now under the motorway [14, pp. 3–4].

The excavators found no standing architecture at all. Instead there were more than 100 pits cut into the soft marl: large ones up to 2.75 metres across and over two metres deep, smaller ones used as hearths or ovens, and bell-shaped ones like the grain-storage pits dug in Cyprus until recent times [14, pp. 4–5]. Dikaios had read such sites as pit-dwellings. Todd read Ayious as "a settlement of lightly built huts, most traces of which have been erased by erosion and plowing" [14, p. 10].

Two of the pits were joined underground. A tunnel, never more than 1.10 metres high, ran from Pit 25 to the shaft of Pit 27, and a second tunnel led to a stepped entrance at the surface. The tunnels turned at sharp angles and narrowed into porthole-like openings that could be closed with slabs of gypsum, and Todd thought them "clearly designed to impede movement" [14, p. 6]. Their fill held few objects, and "the reasons for the cutting of the tunnels ... remain unknown" [14, p. 10]. Steel has floated a ritual purpose connected with the underworld, while noting that there is "insufficient evidence ... to explore this hypothesis fully" [9, pp. 85–86].

Most of the 37 figurines from Ayious came from the tunnel complex. All but one are of clay, every one whose sex can be told is female, and nearly all are broken. Todd allowed that this "might suggest deliberate breakage, but there is no positive evidence of that" [14, pp. 7–8]; Steel is more confident that they were broken on purpose [9, p. 99]. The people of Ayious ate a great deal of venison. Fallow deer make up 70 per cent of the 871 identified animal bones and about 86 per cent of the meat, with goats and sheep, pigs, dogs and foxes making up the rest [15, pp. 70–71].

• Early Chalcolithic Figurine SherdChalcolithic · 3900–3400 BCLarnaca Museum
• Flanged-base TrayChalcolithic · 4000–3600 BCLemba Archeological Project

On the Paphos coast, at Kissonerga-Mylouthkia, Peltenburg's team found about 40 pits, a ditch and the post-holes of light buildings, dated to a short span in the middle of the 4th millennium BC [11, ch. 24]. Inside the largest pit, Pit 1, five light shelters were built one after another. Building 152 was a round post-framed house about 6 metres across, standing above ground with plaster basins, a hearth and six querns: proof that the "pit sites" had surface buildings too [11, ch. 24].

Rescue work in 2000 found the first securely dated Early Chalcolithic graves at Mylouthkia, among them a headless adult laid on a stone dish crusted with red ochre, and two parallel ditches inland, the first 4.4 metres wide and 2.7 metres deep. Croft thought them "very likely to have been defensive" [11, pp. xxxi–xxxii].

The same site shows the change that defines the next phase. In one plot a pit was followed by a stone-based structure and then by Building 200, "unequivocally the succession of stone-based structures over a pit", with a complete change in the pottery; its floor is dated to about 3630–3360 BC [11, ch. 24]. Building 200 burned with a child of six to eight years on its floor and some 200 objects inside, and no one came back for the body or the goods [11, ch. 24].

Erimi and the first stone round houses

Erimi-Pamboula lies on a low plateau on the east bank of the Kouris river, within the modern village and about three miles from the sea [16, p. 73]. Steel notes that it sits where the Kouris valley meets the coast road, and that the Kouris riverbed is a main source of picrolite [9, pp. 94–95]. Dikaios dug there for the Department of Antiquities from 1933 to 1935, in an area of no more than 150 square metres but 5.5 metres deep, taking out thirteen levels in artificial spits of 20 centimetres, and published the final report in 1936 [16, p. 73; 17].

Dikaios sorted the houses in his trench into four types: timber huts partly sunk into the ground, timber huts above ground, huts outlined by a ring of pebbles, and houses on a low stone foundation. As Peltenburg summed it up, "the major thrust of development is clearly from hollows to timber to stone buildings" [18, p. 18]. When Diane Bolger restudied the site in the 1980s she grouped the thirteen levels into three phases: hollows with timber superstructures at the bottom, the first stone foundations in the middle, and stone-founded houses in all the upper levels [19; 16, p. 73]. The village was lived in from about the middle of the 4th millennium until about 3000 BC [16, p. 73].

Four burials came out of the sounding: two adults, a child and an adolescent of about fourteen. One adult lay flexed under the floor of a hut, covered with stones, with a large stone over the head. The body had been laid on deer antlers, with an animal's shoulder blade on the chest; sherds of a single pot were the only grave goods found at the site [16, pp. 73–74].

Bolger's restudy produced a find of its own. In the basement of the Cyprus Museum, among the Erimi material, she found two copper pieces that Dikaios had never published: a hook 2.9 centimetres long, which his 1933 day-book recorded at 0.4–0.6 metres depth "in a clearly Chalcolithic context", and a probable knife fragment of doubtful origin [1, p. 44]. A survey of 1980 by Stuart Swiny and his colleagues showed that Late Chalcolithic material lay in another part of the site, so the settlement had shifted within the site [20].

In 2025 a team from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens under Giorgos Vavouranakis, with Ioannis Voskos, completed the first season of a new excavation at Pamboula. They reported parts of two buildings, Red-on-White pottery, deer bones and picrolite ornaments, among them part of a cross-shaped figure, and the Department of Antiquities dated the settlement to about 3500–2900 BC [21; 22]. The results are preliminary. Erimi-Pamboula should not be confused with Erimi-Laonin tou Porakou nearby, a Middle Bronze Age workshop site 1,500 years younger; both are described on the Erimi page.

Round-house villages in the west: Lemba and Kissonerga

In 1974 Edgar Peltenburg was excavating at Ayios Epiktitos-Vrysi on the north coast. The Turkish invasion that summer cut him off from the site, and he turned to the south-west, where finds of cross-shaped stone figurines pointed to Chalcolithic villages [23, p. 334]. The Lemba Archaeological Project, run from Glasgow and later Edinburgh, began with a trial excavation at Lemba-Lakkous in 1976 [24, p. 140]. Lemba was dug from 1976 to 1983 and published in 1985, a report the reviewer Sinclair Hood called "a landmark, both for the quality of the excavation and for the prompt and full publication of results" [23, p. 334]. Kissonerga-Mosphilia followed from 1979 to 1992, after terracing for banana plantations began to destroy it [10, p. 19; 25].

Lemba-Lakkous sits on a terrace about 4 kilometres north of Paphos and a kilometre from the sea [26]. Its first houses were small and round, built of mud stiffened with pebbles directly on the ground, with scooped floors, round plaster hearths and doors facing south-east [26, p. 113]. Later houses stood on stone footings, and a "Store Area" held at least eleven pits for large jars, about 7 cubic metres of storage, enough by Christine Winkelmann's estimate to feed about twenty people for a year [16, p. 63]. Lemba's 56 graves held about 60 people, most of them infants and children, each usually laid alone and contracted [16, p. 64]. Among the finds was a stone slab with cup-marks laid out in a spiral like the board of the Egyptian game mehen [23, p. 334].

At Kissonerga-Mosphilia the round houses grew very large. In the phase the excavators call Period 3B, about 3200–2900 BC, a paved track at least 15 metres long ran north–south between houses more than 8.5 metres across, with internal areas of 77 square metres or more, foundations of calcarenite, a soft sandy stone, rectangular central hearths and radial partitions marking off one room with a hard lime floor [10, p. 22]. Peltenburg wrote that they were "the largest in prehistoric Cyprus" [10, p. 22]. Building 206, the "Red Building", had red-painted floors and walls in its eastern room. Peltenburg first estimated it at 12–15 metres across [27, p. 13]; the final report gives about 14.5 metres and 132.7 square metres of floor [25; 6, p. 328]. He judged it "a major house, not ... a specialized ceremonial construction" [27, p. 13].

These houses held the first pithoi, large storage jars, made in Cyprus, some boldly painted and closed with mushroom-shaped limestone lids up to 30 centimetres across [10, p. 23]. Labour, Peltenburg noted, "was explicitly concentrated on certain buildings that possessed special pottery and storage containers" [10, p. 26]. According to Peltenburg, the largest picrolite cross-shaped figure known from Cyprus also came from Period 3 at Kissonerga [10, p. 26].

• Terracotta bowlChalcolithic · 3900–2500 BCMetropolitan Museum of Art

What a Chalcolithic round house was like

No Chalcolithic wall survives to its full height; the best stand under 80 centimetres. What is known of the rest comes from careful excavation and from the Lemba Experimental Village, where Gordon Thomas and his team built full-size houses from 1988 [28]. A typical house was a single circular room set in a shallow scoop. A stone footing laid in mud carried an upper wall of mud laid by hand, which Thomas calls "mudwall" to separate it from mudbrick and from rammed earth, rendered with red soil, white havara clay and, in the Middle Chalcolithic, true lime plaster [28; 25, pp. 54–62]. The roof was flat or nearly so: timbers, a mat of reeds or branches, and a thick layer of earth [28].

The door opened inwards on a post whose foot turned in a socketed stone on the left as one entered [25, pp. 54–62]. The hearth in the middle never carried a roof post, as Dikaios and Bolger had thought, since the hearths are too fragile to have borne the weight [25, pp. 54–62]. In house after house the quarter of the floor to the right of the door was set apart with ridges, harder lime floors or red paint; why is unknown [25, pp. 54–62].

Reconstruction · Building · Middle Chalcolithic

A Chalcolithic Round House, Layer by Layer

c. 3500–2900 BC

A Middle Chalcolithic round house taken apart layer by layer, from the stone footing and mud wall to the flat earth roof, with the door pivot and the marked-off room to the right of the door.

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

Plan · c. 3500 to 2900 BC

A Chalcolithic round house

after houses at Kissonerga-Mosphilia and Lemba-Lakkous

1234567

02 m

Scale bar: 2 metres.

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

1. 1The wall
2. 2The doorway
3. 3Platform hearth
4. 4Radial ridges
5. 5Red platform floor
6. 6Storage jar
7. 7Basin

Key

• Excavated
• Roofed floor
• Fitting
• Area marked on the floor

The architecture course has a lesson on the round houses of the Chalcolithic.

Deer, pigs and goats

Chalcolithic villagers kept or hunted only three main animals: the Mesopotamian fallow deer, the pig, and the goat (with a few sheep). There were no cattle on the island until the very end of the period [15]. The deer were hunted and never domesticated; Croft's term for the way they were exploited is "controlled predation" [15]. Over the period the balance shifted. At Mylouthkia deer gave about 70 per cent of the meat, but by the Late Chalcolithic pigs had drawn level, with deer at 47.5 per cent and pig at 46.7 at Kissonerga, and pig ahead at Lemba [15, p. 71]. Croft explains the change by population growth, which shrank the stretches of country where deer could breed unhunted [15, pp. 72–73].

The goat herds at Kissonerga had more adult males than a herder after meat or milk would keep, and Croft suggests they were kept partly for display or for competitive feasts [15, p. 74]. In the fields the villagers grew barley, emmer, einkorn, bread wheat, lentils, vetch and grass pea with hoes, without the plough, and gathered or tended olive, grape, fig and pistachio [9, p. 92].

Population figures are models only. Peltenburg's estimates put dispersed Lemba at perhaps 240 people and Late Chalcolithic Kissonerga at "nearly one thousand" [10, p. 18]; nobody has offered a figure for the island as a whole.

The Lemba Lady and the Kissonerga building model

In the first season at Lemba, in 1976, the excavators came on a limestone figure 36 centimetres high lying on its back against the wall of a round building, behind storage jars, one of which had fallen over it [24, p. 141; 23, p. 335]. The building, Building 1, stood on the lip of the upper terrace about 100 metres from the houses of the time, and belongs to the later part of the Middle Chalcolithic [9, p. 98; 16, p. 138]. A pebble-lined groove divided its floor; one side had plaster "of cement-like hardness" [24, p. 141].

The figure, now known as the Lemba Lady, has outstretched arms, a long neck and a tilted oval head with eyes in relief. Two identical incised V-shapes mark the breasts and the pubic triangle. She is carved on the front only, and her splayed base cannot hold her upright, so Winkelmann concludes that she was meant to lie down [24, p. 141; 16, p. 138].

Peltenburg proposed in 1977 that Building 1 was a sacred place, and that the small cross-shaped pendants of the period were copies of large cult figures like this one [24, p. 141]. Steel reads the building as ceremonial, with graves close by, though she cautions that nothing shows the figure was worshipped [9, pp. 98, 102]. Winkelmann notes that the graves are older than the building and that it had ordinary domestic features; the figure may simply have been stored there, although Building 1 may still be the earliest known sacred place in Cyprus [16, p. 138].

At Kissonerga the excavators found a pit beneath the floor of Building 994, the last Period 3 building in their area, holding heat-cracked stones, ochre-stained tools and a stack of vessels; the top bowl stood upright with its rim poking through the floor above [10, pp. 23–25]. At the bottom was an upright bowl packed with ten limestone figures and nine of pottery, a large triton shell, a four-legged model stool, a pierced clay cone, and pestles and rubbing stones. Peltenburg called it "a nonmortuary hoard in which highly unusual objects were taken out of circulation" [10, p. 24]. The pit is known as Unit 1015.

The bowl at the bottom is itself a model of a round building, with a doorway, a removable door with the bracket and pivot it turned in, a central hearth and ridges on the floor. Its walls had been painted with step-squares, bands and a pole with streamers, and then the painting had been covered with an unfired buff slip. The stubs of nine figures that once stood above the entrance had been snapped off. Peltenburg concluded that the people who buried it set out to "kill" the figurative objects [10, p. 25].

• Chalcolithic Red-on-White Building ModelChalcolithic · 4000–2400 BCCyprus Museum, Nicosia

All the pottery figures but one are female, and three can be restored as tall women seated on four-legged stools "in the act of giving birth" [10, p. 24; 29]. On the best preserved, the baby's head and arms are painted in red between the mother's legs, coming out head first, and a pendant in the shape of a human figure is painted at her neck [29, p. 157]. Peltenburg read the deposit as the closing ceremony of a part of the village about to be left, with fires and feasting in the earth ovens nearby [10, p. 25; 27, pp. 13–15]. Elizabeth Goring noticed that the figures were rubbed as if much handled, on the belly, hips, breasts and genitals, and suggested that they were used to show what would happen in childbirth, perhaps at an initiation, or in a ritual during the birth itself [29, pp. 158–160]. Winkelmann finds no meaningful arrangement of figures inside the bowl against those outside it [16, p. 153]. The closest parallel is the clay sanctuary model from Bellapais-Vounous, made a thousand years later: both are open bowls with fittings and a marked entrance, and both carry nineteen figures [10, p. 26].

Picrolite and the cross-shaped figures

Picrolite is a soft serpentinite, green to blue-green and waxy to the touch, which older books call "steatite". Its workable seams lie high in the central Troodos around Pano Amiandos, and only two rivers, the Kouris and the Karyotis, carry its pebbles down to the coast [30]. In the Kouris near Erimi, a few minutes of searching yields "a bagful of excellent-quality pebbles" up to 14 centimetres across [30, p. 136]. A cross-shaped figure could be carved from one in about an hour, as an experiment showed, and the number of worked picrolite pieces rises from about 50 recorded for the 5th millennium BC to 445 provenanced Chalcolithic pieces [31, pp. 113–116].

The cross-shaped, or cruciform, figures are the hallmark of the period. Winkelmann's catalogue of 2020 counts 119 picrolite cruciform figurines and 143 cruciform pendants. Most are 5–6 centimetres tall, rarely up to 15 [16]. The figure throws its head back on a long neck, stretches its arms out sideways and draws its knees up, and its back is flat and plain [16, p. 290]. Only 18 of 113 figurines are perforated; most hung from a cord tied below the head, and the wear on them shows that they were worn in life [16, p. 339]. Picrolite figures are never found deposited with stone or clay figures [16]. The compendium entry on cruciform figurines describes the varieties in detail.

• Picrolite figureChalcolithic · 3900–2500 BCMetropolitan Museum of Art
• Assorted Picrolite FigurinesChalcolithic · 4000–2400 BCCyprus Museum, Nicosia

The figure that shows best how they were worn is said to come from Yialia near Pomos, in the Paphos district, though it was bought from a private owner and its findspot cannot be checked. It is 15.6 centimetres tall, of green picrolite, and it wears round its neck, carved in relief, a miniature cruciform of its own, bent legs and all [16, pp. 303, 339]. Desmond Morris drew a conclusion from it: "no self-respecting goddess would need the protection of her own image hanging from her neck" [32, p. 125].

At Kissonerga the only graves with picrolite in them were children's. Grave 563 held two children, and the upper one wore a necklace of beads cut from dentalium, a small tusk-shaped sea shell, with a picrolite cruciform pendant [33]. The pendant is 10.1 centimetres long, too large for an infant, and Winkelmann concludes that an adult wore it first [16]. Not one of dozens of adult graves at Kissonerga had any picrolite. Peltenburg inferred that adult women wore cruciforms in life, perhaps only in their child-bearing years, and that burial with one was an honour given to some children [31, pp. 114–115].

What the figures meant is argued over. From the 1980s Morris and Annemarie a Campo, and then Goring and Bolger, read the bent knees and outstretched arms as a birthing posture, and the clay birth figures from Kissonerga seemed to confirm it [34, p. 151]. Winkelmann rejects the link: most cruciforms have no sex marked, none shows pregnancy, and their legs are pressed together, unlike the seated, spread-legged clay birth figures. She treats them as amulets with a meaning of their own [16, pp. 400, 407]. Richard Lesure reads the form as a schematic sign, a kind of logo [35; 34, p. 150]. Bleda Düring calls the birth reading a "factoid", repeated until it was taken for fact, and suggests dancers instead: a necklace of several pendants as a ring of dancers, and figures with one hand up and one down as a turning movement [34, pp. 152–154]. The excavations at Souskiou, described below, found cruciform necklaces with men as well as women.

After the looting of Souskiou, many cruciforms reached the market with a claimed Souskiou origin that cannot be checked, and Winkelmann lists such pieces only as "probably from Souskiou-Vathyrkakas"; forgers have copied the type as well [16, pp. 25, 347]. The Metropolitan Museum bought its cruciform, shown above, in 1951 from the dealer Nicolas Koutoulakis [36]. The site's article on the cruciform figures follows them in more depth, and the game The Carver of Souskiou lets you grind, drill and polish a picrolite pendant from a river pebble and follow it to the tomb.

Souskiou, the figurine makers and their cemeteries

Souskiou lies about two kilometres inland from Palaepaphos (Kouklia), where the Vathyrkakas stream joins the Dhiarizos river. A narrow ridge about a kilometre long, Laona, carried the village; the Vathyrkakas cemeteries face it across the ravine [6, pp. 2–3]. They and the Laona cemetery are the only known Chalcolithic cemeteries in Cyprus set apart from a settlement [6, p. 323]. Elsewhere the dead lay among the houses, though Peltenburg himself thought that other separate cemeteries probably await discovery [37].

In 1950–51 the British Kouklia Expedition under J. H. Iliffe found many tombs, most of them long since looted, and dug three [38]. In 1951 Tryphonas Koulermou and George Pastos, the custodian at Kouklia, found the Laona village while looking for the homes of the people buried across the ravine [6, p. 2]. In 1972, after 17 tombs were looted, Franz-Georg Maier's German expedition salvaged them and Demos Christou of the Department of Antiquities excavated intact tombs; Christou and Evi Baxevani returned for a rescue excavation from 1991 to 1997 [38]. Edinburgh, under Peltenburg and Lindy Crewe, dug at Laona from 2001 to 2011, first the cemetery and then the village, and published both in Figurine Makers of Prehistoric Cyprus [6, p. 1]. Three looting attempts during the cemetery seasons forced the team to camp on site overnight and to cover some tombs with debris when no one was there [6, p. 1]. About half the burial features in both cemeteries had been badly looted, but the looting was haphazard, and many plundered tombs still held their lowest burials untouched [6, pp. 1, 323].

Vathyrkakas Cemetery 1 has about 100 rock-cut tombs over some 1,800 square metres, 82 of them Chalcolithic, about half of them bell-shaped shafts, used around 3200–2900 BC [16, p. 81]. Tomb 23 held 1,181 dentalium beads strung with cruciform pendants, a picrolite animal pendant and a copper spiral bead [6, pp. 324–325]. Tomb 73 is the largest Chalcolithic tomb recorded in Cyprus, larger than most tombs of the Early Bronze Age. Its wide upper pit had smoothed white faces, its capstone had hourglass-shaped holes for moving it, and a stone kerb ringed it; it held two adult men. The excavators call it "the earliest unequivocal example of 'aggrandising behaviour' in Cypriot prehistory, although probably by a group rather than an individual" [6, pp. 324, 331; 38, pp. 161–162].

Across the ravine, the Laona cemetery packed 142 burial features into an outcrop of about 600 square metres, and it was in better shape: 22 per cent of features were intact against 12 per cent at Vathyrkakas [6, p. 323]. People of every age were buried there, and the excavators concluded that "the entire population of Souskiou was accorded equal access to burial" [6, p. 326]. Kirsi Lorentz, who studied the bones, reconstructed the rite. The dead were laid tightly flexed on the right side, head to the south-east, and the tomb was left open while the body decayed. Later, someone stacked the bones at the north-west end, small bones first, long bones along the walls and skulls on top, removing nothing and leaving no cut marks [39; 6, p. 326]. Lorentz sees the work of "mortuary specialists" with a detailed knowledge of the human skeleton [6, p. 332]. Five Laona adults had bony growths in the ear canal, the "surfer's ear" of people who work often in cold water [40].

In the burials that could be read securely, men and women alike wore a single pendant on the chest; figurative picrolite lay at the pelvis only with women, while two men had chipped stone tools at the pelvis [6, p. 327]. One woman of 34–40, in Tomb 237, wore eight figurative picrolite pendants in three sets, at her wrist, chest and pelvis [6, p. 327]. Tomb 158, dug in 2003, was a shaft 1.82 metres deep closed with a capstone. The last person put in it was a young man of 18–28, laid over the stacked bones of eight earlier dead, four adults and four children. With him were 267 dentalium beads, three faience beads with tin in the glaze, two picrolite cruciform pendants, a copper spiral bead and a copper pin, the only copper from the cemetery, and a Red-on-White flask on three legs [41, pp. 51–52; 6, pp. 326–327].

Reconstruction · Tomb · Middle Chalcolithic

Souskiou-Laona Tomb 158: A Chalcolithic Shaft Grave

c. 3000 BC

Laona Tomb 158 rebuilt in 3D: the shaft and capstone, the young man laid over the stacked bones of eight earlier burials, and his shell, picrolite, faience and copper ornaments.

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

The village above the cemeteries was founded in the second half of the 4th millennium BC, probably by a group that split off from another village; it covered about 6 hectares over time, but no more than about 2.5 at once [6, p. 328]. Waste from picrolite carving turned up in every building sampled, and the excavators call the village "a major, if not the major, production centre for picrolite artefacts on the island" [6, pp. 328–329]. Their model is a ritual economy, in which funerals created the demand for cruciforms on which the village's living depended [6, p. 328]. Pendants from the Laona cemetery were worn before burial, while those from Vathyrkakas show no wear, as if some were made only for the grave [6, p. 333]. In the village's second period the making of cruciforms stopped and burial moved back among the houses, without grave goods, and early in the 3rd millennium BC the village was left [6, pp. 333–334].

A gap of two centuries in the west

Around 2900 BC Lemba and Kissonerga-Mosphilia were abandoned and, in Steel's words, "left unoccupied for a period of around 200 years". When people came back, the pottery, and much else, had changed [9, p. 106]. Bolger dated abandonments to about the same time in the north, at Kythrea, Lapithos and Ayios Epiktitos-Mezarlik [19, pp. 125–126]. Peltenburg wondered whether the gap hid an "adverse reaction to the arrogation of powers seen at Kissonerga" [42].

Elsewhere, life went on through these centuries. At Politiko-Kokkinorotsos, "Red Rock", on a river terrace in the northern Troodos foothills, David Frankel and Jennifer Webb excavated a camp dated to about 2880–2670 BC [43; 13]. It had no stone buildings and no burials, only pits and a hollow filled with over a tonne of smashed pottery, stone and more than 7,000 identifiable bones. Three quarters were fallow deer, killed between late winter and late summer, and the finds included spouted jars, fine drinking cups and figurine fragments: a seasonal hunters' camp where people also feasted [43; 13]. The Souskiou-Laona village stayed occupied too [13], and at Chlorakas-Palloures, 1.5 kilometres from Kissonerga, a midden runs without a break across the Middle to Late Chalcolithic boundary, "a transition that is not well known from the other Lemba region sites" [44, p. 176].

Charalambos Paraskeva's statistical modelling of the radiocarbon dates suggests the change happened at different times in different places: Politiko and Souskiou took up the new Late Chalcolithic pottery about 2900–2850 BC, while Kissonerga kept to the old ways until about 2850–2800 [8]. The current preference among the excavators is for "gradual processes, perhaps in response to environmental changes" [13].

The Chalcolithic in five stages

1. End of the Late Neolithicc. 4400–4000 BC

   Sotira-culture villages dwindle and are left.

2. Early Chalcolithicc. 3900–3500 BC

   Pits, tunnels and light timber shelters at Kalavasos-Ayious and Kissonerga-Mylouthkia; deer give most of the meat; glossy burnished and early Red-on-White pottery.

3. Middle Chalcolithicc. 3500–2900 BC

   Stone-founded round-house villages at Erimi, Lemba and Kissonerga; the great houses of Kissonerga Period 3B; Red-on-White at its height; picrolite cruciforms; the Souskiou cemeteries; the first copper ornaments.

4. A break in the westc. 2900–2700 BC

   Lemba, Kissonerga and Dikaios's part of Erimi are left for about two centuries; Kokkinorotsos, Souskiou-Laona and Palloures show the break was local.

5. Late Chalcolithicc. 2800–2500 BC

   Red-and-Black Stroke-Burnished pottery; the Pithos House and Palloures Building 1; chamber tombs, the first stamp seal, faience; small copper tools of imported metal; the cruciform disappears.

6. Philia phasec. 2500–2200 BC

   Red Polished pottery, rectangular houses, cattle and the plough, spindle whorls and looms; the start of the Bronze Age.

The Late Chalcolithic: new pottery, bigger stores, burned houses

The painted Red-on-White pottery went out of fashion in the Late Chalcolithic. In the south-west its place was taken by Red-and-Black Stroke-Burnished ware: light red, heavily burnished so that the strokes of the burnisher show, mottled red and black in the firing, with knobs in relief, made as bowls with tab handles and spouted vessels [45]. A study of the clays of 81 sherds from four sites found pots made in the Paphos area at Ambelikou in the north and pots from the Polis region at Palloures, so pottery travelled across the island [46]. Peltenburg read the new shapes as new customs: spouted jugs for pouring drinks, many small bowls, and a taste for fire effects that he traced to the east Aegean and western Anatolia [47].

The Pithos House at Kissonerga

Building 3 at Kissonerga-Mosphilia, the Pithos House, was built early in Period 4, about 2700–2500 BC [25, pp. 37–43; 48]. It was a round stone house 9.1 metres across at most, with about 48 square metres of roofed floor and its door on the south. Inside stood 37 storage jars, with more originally, and about 20 smaller jugs and bowls for pouring and serving. The excavators estimate that the jars held about 4,000 litres between them [25, pp. 37–43; 49].

The permanent jars stood in two rows of shallow, stone-ringed hollows along the north wall, opposite the door, wedged with worn-out grinding stones. The rest stood loose and leaned against one another, filling the floor to within two metres of the door. They range from 20 to 226 litres, and none were stacked [49]. The storage was "far in excess of the needs of a normal domestic unit" [49]. Thirty axes and seventeen adzes, triton shells and a large mortar lay with them [9, p. 110; 49]. What the jars held is unknown: no traces of fat or oil survive in them, so olive oil is unlikely, and too few seeds survive to say what was kept [49].

The house ended in fire. Burnt roof timbers fell on the floor, and then the wall stones "crashed down onto the pithoi". The excavators wrote that "the suddenness of its destruction is vividly attested by the body of a child, Unit 2138, trapped in the western collapse of the upper wall and roof"; the bones are those of an infant [49]. Whether the fire was an accident has become one of the period's main debates. The excavators first assumed so [49]. Peltenburg later called it "probably a deliberate destruction", pointing to "a rejection of the concentration of economic resources in a single household" [42, p. 262], and by 2018 he wrote of it as deliberately burnt [47]. Düring adds that houses of earth and stone are hard to set alight, as the Lemba experiments showed, so he argues that fuel was added [50, p. 92], and he reads the burning as "a social event in which the ritual destruction of wealth played a key role" [50, pp. 92–93]. About one building in five at Kissonerga, six of 32, ended in fire with its contents inside, and about one in ten at Chlorakas-Palloures [50, p. 93; 51]. Winkelmann leaves the question open [16, p. 86], and no excavated evidence settles it.

What the house was is debated too. Peltenburg saw an elite household that stored and redistributed goods, noting that "the installations and organization of space conform to standard house arrangements" [27, pp. 15–16]. Steel prefers "social storage", a village reserve against bad years [9, pp. 111–113]. Later builders came back to the exact spot. In the ruins, Building 706 housed the working of shell beads and pendants, lumps of copper ore and a conical stamp seal, "the earliest securely dated example from Cyprus" [10, p. 29]. Then came Building 86, small but "one of the best constructed prehistoric buildings of Cyprus", its door set "almost directly over the entrance" of the Pithos House [10, pp. 29–30; 49].

Reconstruction · Building · Late Chalcolithic

The Pithos House at Kissonerga

c. 2700–2500 BC

The Pithos House rebuilt in 3D: the two rows of fixed jars along the north wall, the loose jars filling the floor, and the fire that brought the roof down.

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

Plan · c. 2700 to 2500 BC

The Pithos House

Kissonerga-Mosphilia, Building 3

12345678910

02 m

Scale bar: 2 metres.

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

1. 1The wall
2. 2The doorway
3. 3Round hearth
4. 4Post settings
5. 5The storage bank
6. 6Massive jar KM 5556
7. 7Barrel KM 5558 with six bowls
8. 8Jars on the floor
9. 9Stone basin KM 882
10. 10Tool store

Key

• Excavated
• Roofed floor
• Fitting
• Area marked on the floor

The last houses at Lemba

At Lemba the round houses of the Late Chalcolithic stood in groups round open yards [28]. The largest, Building 2, about 8.5 metres across, was built over graves linked to its floor by channels and holes, and Peltenburg read it as a household keeping its ancestors close: "Closeness to the ancestors legitimates social differences" [27, pp. 16–17]. In Building 7, plastered basins with querns and spouted flasks may have served for making beer [9, p. 113]. Around 2500 BC Lemba burned. Building 2 was full of ash and crushed pots, five storage jars had fallen from its north-west wall, and five more buildings burned with it. Bolger concludes that burning every building took deliberate effort. Lemba was never lived in again [52].

Building 1 at Chlorakas-Palloures

The largest Late Chalcolithic building yet found stands on the edge of Chlorakas, about 3 kilometres north of Paphos. The dig there began with an email of November 2013 in which Peltenburg suggested the site to Düring, who led a rescue excavation for Leiden University and the Department of Antiquities from 2015 to 2017 [44, p. 167]. Building 1 at Chlorakas-Palloures measures 14 metres across, with a double-faced wall about a metre thick; the excavators call it "the largest and most impressive building discovered thus far in Late Chalcolithic Cyprus" [44, p. 172]. A roof post dates it to about 2875–2665 BC. It had a central hearth platform 2.5 metres across, two benches of diabase boulders, a mortar with two hollows sunk into the floor, and white plaster on floor, walls, threshold and porch [44, pp. 172–173]. Three complete deer antlers lay on the collapse inside it [44, pp. 172, 174].

The 15 burials found at Palloures held at least 17 people: six infants under three, and among the adults and older adolescents four women and four whose sex could not be told. No men were identified, and none of the dead had grave goods [44, pp. 182–183]. The site has no Philia pottery at all, which makes it likely that it was abandoned before the Philia phase began [5, p. 672]. The Department of Antiquities reported in 2024 burned round houses with complete vessels crushed inside, and the burial of a child of about six placed head-down; these finds are preliminary [53].

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)

Chamber tombs and faience

The Late Chalcolithic also changed the way the dead were buried. At Kissonerga chamber tombs appear beside the old pit graves, cut from a shaft and holding several bodies, the type that would become "the standard tomb type throughout the rest of antiquity in Cyprus" [10, p. 30]. Grave 505, its shaft 1.6 metres deep and sealed below the hearth of a house, had two chambers, one with two adults each buried with a spouted flask, the other with a single flexed body [10, p. 30]. Jennifer Webb and David Frankel point out that the dated examples belong to the very end of the period, Period 4b [48]. Kissonerga's faience disc beads, a glazed synthetic material, were hailed as the earliest of their kind in the Mediterranean [10, p. 30], though Souskiou has since produced faience beads of the Middle Chalcolithic, with tin in the glaze, probably imported [3; 6, p. 334].

Copper before the Bronze Age

"Paradoxically," Düring and his co-authors write, "transformative copper metallurgy arrived late on an island that became so closely associated with this metal" [5, p. 682]. The earliest Cypriot copper belongs to the Middle Chalcolithic, long after copper was first smelted in the Balkans, Anatolia and the Near East; the oldest copper objects in neighbouring Anatolia date to the end of the 9th millennium BC [3, pp. 280–281]. Noel Gale listed 11 copper objects in 1991; Peltenburg's catalogue of 2011 listed 18 from five sites, probably less than a kilogram of metal in all. The Nahal Mishmar hoard in the Levant alone holds 416 objects of copper and copper alloys [3, pp. 279–280].

The Middle Chalcolithic pieces are ornaments, spiral beads and pendants, shaped by cold hammering. The Late Chalcolithic pieces are small tools, awls and chisels, cast in simple open moulds [3, pp. 279–281]. Vasiliki Kassianidou compares this cold working to the way chert and picrolite were processed [4, p. 20]. A tiny copper hook from Mylouthkia, 1.3 centimetres long, was once dated to about 3500 BC [1, pp. 43–44], but it came from a cleaned section, and the final report waits for "endorsement of that date from properly stratified evidence"; until then the first securely dated metalwork comes from Middle Chalcolithic Erimi and perhaps Souskiou [11, ch. 17]. Kissonerga's Period 4 produced an awl, chisels, lumps of ore and two possible crucibles, "the sole evidence to date for copper working in a Chalcolithic settlement" [3, p. 281], and one chisel of bronze with 3.3 per cent tin [3]. Cypriot ores contain no tin, so a tin bronze points to imported metal [4, pp. 19–20].

In Building 6 at Palloures the excavators found a large collared storage jar. Inside lay a copper axe about 7.5 centimetres long and 119 grams in weight, the largest Chalcolithic metal object from Cyprus, with hooks made from pig tusks, probably for fishing, and a flat stone axe shaped to look like the copper one, with copper corrosion stuck to it [4, pp. 14, 17–18; 44, p. 179]. A barley seed in the jar dates the group to about 2600 BC [4, p. 16]. The excavators read the jar as a deliberate cache, probably buried when the house was closed [4, pp. 14–15].

The axe is 99.5 per cent copper, and its lead isotopes "match only with Anatolian ores, and a Cypriot origin of the copper can be excluded" [5, p. 678]. In 2018 the team had thought local smelting in the Late Chalcolithic "becoming more plausible, if far from proven"; by 2021, after the isotope results, they concluded that there is no compelling evidence for it, and no Chalcolithic smelting site is known on the island [4; 5]. The compendium entry on copper metallurgy and the article Metal in Ancient Cyprus continue the story into the Bronze Age, when Cyprus became a great producer of copper.

The end of the Chalcolithic and the Philia phase

At Kissonerga a child was buried, in Grave 529, wearing a necklace of dentalium shells, a shell ring pendant made on the site and a copper spiral ring [10, p. 31]. The grave belongs to Period 5, around 2400 BC, when Red Polished pottery of the Philia phase, Black Slip-and-Combed ware and clay spindle whorls appear in the village, alongside urn burials of crouched children in jars [10, p. 31]. Cattle appear in the animal bones for the first time [49].

The Philia phase brought rectangular houses of several rooms in mudbrick on stone footings, hearths against the walls, cattle, the plough and donkeys, spindle whorls and the warp-weighted loom, Red Polished pottery and cemeteries outside the villages [48; 54]. At Marki-Alonia, a village of the period, deer and pig gave only 11 per cent of the meat, cattle 24 and sheep and goats 62 [54]. Philia Red Polished pottery was on the island by about 2500 BC [47], and Paraskeva's dates make the turn from Late Chalcolithic to Philia "rapid and abrupt", around 2510–2480 BC [8].

Who brought the change is argued along three lines. Webb and Frankel see communities from Anatolia settling in the west and north-west around 2500 BC, bringing a whole way of life with them; at Kissonerga, in their reading, the locals took up some prestige items, chamber tombs, spurred pendants and metalworking, but kept their own hearths and food [48; 54]. Peltenburg and Bolger stress long contact with Anatolia before the Philia phase, which triggered change from within, and the choices of the islanders themselves [55; 47]. Knapp speaks of the meeting and mixing of different groups, which produced "entirely new material forms and social practices" [56, p. 128]. No ancient DNA has yet been studied from Chalcolithic Cyprus, and a first strontium study of teeth from Erimi, Sotira and Kandou found no sign of large-scale movement [57].

Picrolite carving declined in the same centuries. Its production was cut back in the Late Chalcolithic, when blue faience beads appeared, and Peltenburg argued that the Bronze Age trade in copper did not grow out of the picrolite network [31, pp. 117–118]. The cruciforms disappear, and for some five centuries human figures are almost absent from Cyprus [6, p. 334]. The two flat plank figures of Red Polished clay below, made around 2000 BC, belong to the time when human figures returned.

• Red Polished Two-Necked Plank FigureMiddle Bronze Age I · 2000–1850 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Red Polished Three-Necked Plank FigureMiddle Bronze Age I · 2000–1800 BCDrakopoulos collection

At Kissonerga-Mosphilia the village lived on into the Philia phase, about 2500 BC, and beyond, its houses drifting a few hundred metres to Kissonerga-Skalia [6, p. 334; 25]. The story continues with the Philia phase and the Early Bronze Age on the Bronze Age page.