Resource Stress and Subsistence Practice in Early Prehistoric Cyprus

RESOURCE STRESS AND SUBSISTENCE PRACTICE IN EARLY PREHISTORIC CYPRUS by Seth L. Button A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Classical Art and Archaeology) in The University of Michigan 2010 Doctoral Committee: Professor Sharon C. Herbert, Chair Professor Henry T. Wright Associate Professor Nicola Terrenato Associate Professor Lauren E. Talalay © Seth L. Button 2010 For my parents, Roger and Kathy Button, my first and best teachers. ii Acknowledgments First, I wish to thank the members of my committee: Sharon Herbert, Henry Wright, Nicola Terrenato, and Lauren Talalay. The professors and curators in IPCAA, the Kelsey Museum, and the Museum of Anthropology at Michigan also furnished welcome advice and assistance. On Cyprus I had the good luck to work with Sturt Manning, Carole McCartney, Steven Falconer, Kevin Fisher, Paul Croft, and Eilis Monahan. I am also grateful to Ian Todd and Allison South for their hospitality in Kalavasos, and for sharing their intimate knowledge of the Vasilikos Valley. Stuart Swiny and Alan Simmons patiently answered questions, while Bernard Knapp and Matthew Spigelman were kind enough to share drafts of their work. Most foreign scholars who work on Cyprus for any length of time come to know the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) in Nicosia as a second home. The Director, Tom Davis, Diana Constantinides, the Librarian, and Vathoulla Moustoukki, the Executive Assistant, helped with a hundred things. My fellow graduate students in IPCAA, anthropological archaeology, and Near Eastern Studies have been my most encouraging colleagues and most honest critics: Lindsey Ambridge, Lisa Cakmak, Cat Crawford, Henry Colburn, Ryan Hughes, Tom Landvatter, Amanda Logan, Charlotte Maxwell-Jones, Adrian Ossi, Colin Quinn, Dan iii Shoup, and Adela Sobotkova. Emily Holt provided encouragement and support from the first day of this project to the last. Financial support for research and writing was provided by the Rackham School of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan, the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology, the International Institute, and the John Griffiths Pedley Travel Fund. iv Table of Contents Dedication....................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................... iii List of Figures ............................................................................................................... vi List of Tables ............................................................................................................... viii Chapter 1. Resource Stress and Subsistence Practice in Early Prehistoric Cyprus…... 1 Chapter 2. The Environment and Culture History of Cyprus ……………………….. 20 Chapter 3. Subsistence Practice in the Aceramic Neolithic ………………………… 80 Chapter 4. Subsistence Practice in the Ceramic Neolithic …………………………. 180 Chapter 5. Subsistence Practice in the Chalcolithic ………………………………... 229 Chapter 6 . Discussion and Conclusions …………………………………………… 339 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………… 411 v List of Figures Figure 1. Location of Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea ………………………. 21 Figure 2. Interannual variation in yields of wheat, barley and vetches in Cyprus over the course of the 20th century……………………………………………………… 47 Figure 3. Proxy climate data for the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene……………………………………………………………………... 50 Figure 4. Selected Early Prehistoric sites superimposed on modern perennial stream flow……………………………………………………………………………… 54 Figure 5. Map showing Aceramic Neolithic sites discussed……………………………. 81 Figure 6. Anthracology diagram for Shillourokambos and Khirokitia…………………. 85 Figure 7. Stratigraphic relationships at Khirokitia ……………………………………. 141 Figure 8. Pollen and anthacology data for Khirokitia……………………………….... 144 Figure 9. Late Neolithic sites represented according to whether Red-on-White (circles) or Combed Ware ceramics (triangles) predominate....…………...................... 181 Figure 10. Ceramic Neolithic sites in the Stavros tis Psokas and Khrysokhou drainages in Western Cyprus…………………………………………………………... 209 Figure 11. Aerial view of Kantou Kouphovounos, Central Area…………………........ 210 vi Figure 12. Map showing locations of major Chalcolithic sites discussed…………… 234 Figure 13. Chalcolithic sites in Khrysokhou Bay drainage………………………….. 321 Figure 14. Runoff by catchment areas……………………………………………….. 344 vii List of Tables Table 1. Chronology of the Early Prehistoric of Cyprus ………………………………… 3 Table 2. Summary of representation of major terrestrial animal species at selected Early Prehistoric sites ……………………………………………………………………….. 407 viii CHAPTER 1 RESOURCE STRESS AND SUBSISTENCE PRACTICE IN EARLY PREHISTORIC CYPRUS All agricultural life, the best part of Mediterranean life, is commanded by the need for haste. Over all looms fear of the winter: it is vital to fill cellars and granaries. -Fernand Braudel (1972(1949), 256)) "What you've rediscovered, in your own very humble way," he went on, "is that we must have a spatially bounded universe with a series of populations in it, and that we must draw samples from those populations in such a way as to recover data on the nature and sources of variation. And that's no more, and no less, than what I like to call The Basic Paradigm of Good Archaeology." -the Great Synthesizer (Flannery 1976, 8). This study deals with subsistence practice on the island of Cyprus, in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, between the 9th and 3rd millennia BCE: specifically, the role of strategies or mechanisms for dealing with the effects of periodic resource shortages. It seeks to characterize variability in subsistence practice among village sites over the course of this 6,000 year period, investigate how these practices relate to the nature of risk experienced by village societies, and to suggest how subsistence practices relate to social change. Briefly, a variety of strategies for managing subsistence risk were introduced to Cyprus in the Aceramic Neolithic along with 1 agricultural domesticates, and continued to develop through the Ceramic Neolithic and the Chalcolithic periods (see Table 1, below). These strategies were nested, in that they responded to stress at different scales. They had to be adapted to local conditions, which varied considerably, and they were not uniformly successful. At several points in time, the repertoire of strategies changed markedly, whether in response to the mechanisms' failure or due to social changes arising out of the unintended consequences of the buffering mechanisms themselves. Several buffering mechanisms, especially the use of stored surplus but also careful management of hunted animals, were manipulated at times of critical change by aggrandizing individuals or sub- groups, contributing to social inequality—which, however, was relatively short-lived before the Early Bronze Age, a period not covered in this study. The focus here on documenting and attempting to explain variability in early agriculture within a particular region (cf. Iriarte 2009) may require some explanation. Nearly every archaeology student has at some time seen a slide lecture illustrated with scenes of people plowing with draft animals, sowing seed by hand, taking water from a canal with a swipe or shadouf, reaping with sickles, threshing, grinding grain by hand or in animal-powered mills, or herding sheep and goats. Such images are valuable, insofar as they represent ways of doing things which in the circum- Mediterranean are increasingly rare. They also give students, most of whom have no first-hand experience with traditional agricultural methods, ideas about what past peoples' daily activities and concerns were like, and some of the kinds of behavior that shaped the archaeological record. But these images also have the potential to be 2 problematic, in tacitly perpetuating the idea that ___________________________________________________ Period Absolute Dates Akrotiri Phase ca. 10,500 BCE Aceramic Neolithic/Cypro-PPNA ca. 9000-8200 BCE Aceramic Neolithic/Cypro-PPNB ca. 8200-5200 BCE Late Aceramic Neolithic/Khirokitean ca. 7000-5200 BCE Late Neolithic/Ceramic Neolithic ca. 5200-4000 BCE Chalcolithic ca. 4000-2500 BCE ___________________________________________________ Table 1. Chronology of the Early Prehistoric of Cyprus villages and traditional agricultural practices are not simply conservative but a fossil record of a monolithic agrarian past (Jarman et al. 1982). Just as people in Southwest Asia followed a variety of pathways from reliance on wild plant resources to agriculture (Willcox 2005), early agriculturalists followed divergent paths to the well- tested “Mediterranean” agricultural economies represented by these familiar scenes. Documenting and explaining variation in past people's subsistence practices, at every level from individual households to entire regions, is essential for understanding not only the development of food production, but social changes such as household autonomy, the emergence of persistent material inequalities, and increases in social 3 complexity (Halstead and O'Shea 1989; Feinman 1995; Bender 1995; Bar-Yosef and Meadow 1995; Twiss 2008; Iriarte 2009). In the circum-Mediterranean, ethnographic and ethnohistorical data reveal a wide range of viable agricultural strategies on the part of

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