A project led by a Cornell professor is helping to re-write the early prehistory of Cyprus, the island nation in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. By taking a new approach to examining human civilization, Prof. Sturt Manning, classics, and his team of undergraduate and graduate students from Cornell, the University of Toronto and the University of Cyprus, have uncovered new evidence that agricultural settlements had been formed up to half a millennium earlier than previously believed.

 The Elaborating the Early Neolithic on Cyprus project, led by Manning, is a multi-disciplinary research initiative that uses archeological survey and excavation to investigate very early Neolithic human activity in occupational sites of inland Cyprus.

 In central Cyprus, “we found a key phase of human development that wasn’t known of before,” Manning said.

 “The findings from four excavation seasons at Ayia Varvara Asprokremnos, the focal site of the project … include a clay figurine, a decorated stone bowl, certain arrowhead types, and shaft-straighteners, and many other lithic tools,” said Rachel Kulick ’09, an archeology major who conducted fieldwork as part of the research group.

 Manning first began his investigation in 2006 when he discovered that Cyprus’ prehistory had a large gap between about 10,000 B.C. and 8,200 B.C. where there was no evidence of human activity. He then decided to survey the land in central Cyprus — where there were areas more attractive to human populations — rather than investigating the island coasts as previous projects had done.

 Through intensive fieldwork from 2007 to 2009, the team excavated the site, which totaled several hundred square meters, and meticulously surveyed the surrounding area. Using radiocarbon dating on six charcoal pieces found on the site, the research team determined that this suggests that Ayia Varvara Asprokremnos was occupied by humans around the late 10th to the mid 9th millennia B.C.. These findings support the idea that the prehistoric humans on Cyprus were likely to have been involved in a large-scale trade network and have made active connections between other Near Eastern populations of that period.

 “Furthermore, the lack of charred plant … suggest[s] that foraging was practiced by the site’s inhabitants — agriculture had yet to develop,” Kulick said.

 According to Manning, these findings also point toward the potential use of maritime travel between other parts of the Neolithic world by inhabitants of the island of Cyprus. “This [shows that the civilization was] much more expansive and active [in the] world than we thought,” Manning said.

 The project’s findings were recently published in the archeological journal Antiquity. The results of the project were also presented at an annual archeological conference through Cyprus’ Department of Antiquities.

 “This represents the end of a couple of years of the first phase with the publication of the findings,” Manning said. “[I am hoping to] have a second phase, which would concentrate on excavation [of the site, which includes] quite a lot of land.”