Archaeological field survey of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement sites in Kyrenia District, North Cyprus : systematic surface collection and the interpretation of artefact scatters

For nearly 24 years, the archaeology of northern Cyprus has not been investigated as thoroughly as that in the southern part of the island. All foreign projects, which are responsible for the substantial majority of the archaeological work in Cyprus, are active in the south. This has created a major imbalance in our knowledge of the prehistory of the island. The new discoveries in the south have advanced our knowledge of the prehistoric period in Cyprus in many ways, but at the same time the lack of archaeological work in the north makes these potentially biased, and theoretical approaches cannot be confirmed without knowledge of the whole island. This thesis is an attempt to narrow this gap by applying a survey method that has not been applied on such a large scale in Cyprus before, with new interpretative aims and methods. The period of interest is from the Aceramic Neolithic to the end of the Chalcolithic, approximately 7,500 - 2,800 BC.The survey was carried out in Kyrenia district, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, over two field seasons. A total of twenty-eight sites was selected according to their surface richness from Stanley Price's gazetteer of sites published in 1979. Out of these sites twenty-two had surface finds, three had no surface finds and three were not found. In addition to these sites two previously unknown sites were discovered and surveyed. The method of survey was two-fold. The first was intensive total surface collection using a five metre grid, with results fed into a mapping programme to create scatter maps showing artefact distribution. The second was extensive area survey, which involved systematic field walking accompanied by surface collection.This thesis comprises an overview of previous surveys in Cyprus, explanation of methodologies used for the current survey, discussion of the survey results, and comparisons with results from excavations and other surveys. Questions regarding the interpretation of surface scatters, the shifting and drifting of settlements, and the cultural homogeneity of Cyprus during the period of interest are also addressed