 Thank you very much for all of your attendance and help and I hope it's been a good year for you in terms of the wonderful and diverse student you have. And we're especially pleased to end our year with a wonderful lecture on tour on some new research by this, a professor of anthropology here at UC Berkeley and she has many projects going and it turns out this is just a little extra on the side of how she does it, she's young. But she's now working in Cyprus, deciding to go to the beach I think because probably what's going on after years of sweating it out in the interior deserts. Jordan. Yeah, that's a big part of it. It's probably a picture even of the water, so I got it. But many of you know her first work and quality, so we're hoping to learn a little bit more about her new project here on this island in the Eastern Mediterranean. And so we're going to hear about not mammoths but ancient hunter-gatherer explorers on Cyprus with some boats are probably involved, traversing land and sea during the Epipedolithic. So please welcome Lisa. Thank you very much. I actually don't need that, but just put a little bit of light up here. Okay, I'll turn it off. No, this is fine, I just turn it on. Oh, you want it on? Unless it bugs people, I don't know. All right, thank you very much and thank you for sticking it out to the end of the semester in attending these brown bags, although now you have one more in a couple of weeks time. So today I do want to talk about a new project that I've started recently with a number of colleagues, a number of co-directors, which is why I can do it much more easily than if it were on my own. And what I hope to talk about today is obviously very preliminary in nature, but what I hope to show is that it's a kind of a logical extension from the work that I have been doing on the mainland adjacent to Cyprus in Jordan in the surrounding area, looking at hunter-gatherers in the landscape about 10 to 20,000 years ago. And in many ways this is a topic that is very popular today in our understandings of archeology and particularly in discussions of deep prehistory. As we are continually getting new and new data that push back some of the dates for major sea movements of prehistoric people. And so here we have our nice image of this actually comes from Cyprus, thinking about the relationships between people and the sea over deep prehistory as the painting to the side suggests. And recent evidence is really pushing back this date earlier and earlier and earlier. So we're all aware of the reconstructions of movements across Indonesia and including into Flores with the appearance of Homo floresiensis 90,000 years ago, but we're getting increasing evidence throughout Indonesia and along the Sundas shelf that even when sea levels were lower and many of these places were more connected by land, there were still substantial crossings by sea that were hundreds of thousands of years ago. And you can see just one example here, crossing what we once thought were major geographic boundaries including the Wallisia line and the Lydecker line here. And this actually comes from the recently excavated site at Tulipia here. And so the real question becomes whether or not these are accidental crossings. So are we talking about a Robinson Crusoe scenario kind of washed up? For example, we know that tsunamis and sea currents can actually carry things substantial different distances across open water. And we saw this very recently with the tsunami in Japan where material was washed up on the shore of Washington, the state of Washington. So we can see pretty major movements that we might consider accidental, but when we look at many of these early populations, it's kind of difficult to see them as anything, but at least intentional getting from one place to another where we need viable populations in order for these populations to be sustained on islands. So you need a baseline, you need males and females, you need fairly large numbers because otherwise the likelihood of prolonged survival in many of these places is actually very low. And so the thing to think about for us in terms of looking not just in Indonesia, in deeper history, but also what I wanna talk about today in the Mediterranean is how we can actually look at some of the evidence for these very early seafaring scenarios. And of course the evidence is actually really rare to find, not only because of preservation issues, we think probably some of these seafaring vessels were made of organic materials, but also of course because hunter gatherer sites like the ones I'm gonna talk about are pretty rare. They're generally pretty small scale. Some might even call them ephemeral, although those people who know my work would know I would argue with that term, but they have low archeological visibility even in the best circumstances. So those who have heard me talk about my work at Harana know that this is probably one of the largest, most archeologically rich hunter gatherer sites we have. And yet it's still not nearly as visible as some of the later Neolithic and much later sites that we have from that region. So other considerations to think about when we're talking about the intentionality of seafaring, and here I'll focus on the Mediterranean Sea in particular, is what would have been visible and invisible in terms of a destination from wherever you start out. And this map gives us some idea of areas that would be in black here, largely invisible. I'm focusing here on Cyprus, but if we look at the larger Mediterranean Sea, you can see there's a substantial area from which traversing from one part to the other, you would not have been able to see where you were going. You wouldn't have seen land before you started out. Now, over the last couple of decades, we've really changed the picture of the time depth that we know for seafaring in the Paleolithic period if we look just in the Mediterranean Sea here. So where I work predominantly is this area of Jordan, so the site that I normally talk about is over here, although working in this larger area, this is the island of Cyprus, and then here we have the Aegean Sea with a number of very new localities of very early Middle Paleolithic, so Neanderthal, over 100,000 years, seafaring or movement amongst these islands. So we have good evidence of these Middle Paleolithic handaxes from Orofnidae, Nidia, and Lesbos. We have a couple of sites in the Ionian archipelago where we have handaxes. And then very recently, we have work on the island of Naxos with the Naxos-Stelida project where they have Middle Paleolithic sites and probable Middle Paleolithic quarries. And you can see one of these handaxes here held by one of the directors of this project, Tristan Carter, many of you know as Stringy. And they've published quite a lot of work recently on both their Middle Paleolithic, and you can see some of the examples here, very classic Levalois-like Neanderthal technologies, as well as Mesolithic sites throughout the Naxos Islands. And then also finding several sites showing pretty extensive human occupation during the Middle Paleolithic on the island of Crete. And there's one here, and there are actually a number of sites along the southern coast. So here we have a close-up of the island of Crete. So in fact, now we could fill this whole southern coast with a number of these sites, which looks something like this. So we have, again, this very familiar Middle Paleolithic technology that you can see here. And so then the question, which many scholars have addressed, is thinking about how these Neanderthals are moving around these islands from island to island, and thinking about how far they're going, and what the strategies would have been. Reconstructing technologies that look something like this very so-called primitive raft, and thinking about the affinities of Neanderthals for seafaring, although hot tub is a different story. Our evidence throughout this area in the Epipaleolithic actually looks a lot better. So we have a number of sites that we find at throughout the Greek islands, Cyclops Cape, Maroulis, and a number of others, which I've shown here. I'm giving you kind of the whirlwind tour as I work towards our work in Cyprus. And so my interest in Cyprus really stems from this knowledge that there's actually increasing evidence for seafaring technologies and seafaring capabilities amongst these Paleolithic groups, going back quite deep in prehistory in the Mediterranean Sea, but a lot of evidence really coming to light during the Epipaleolithic period. And I've been interested for a number of years in trying to understand interactions on a larger social landscape among Epipaleolithic groups, particularly focusing in this part. This is a site where I've been excavating for just over a decade now. So thinking about how this large aggregation site is connected to sites throughout this region. And with increasing evidence of the movement of Epipaleolithic groups throughout the Mediterranean Sea, the question then becomes, can I really stop at this coastline? And should we instead be thinking about even larger interactions? We already have some hints of connections between Epipaleolithic groups here and up here, so why not, if we know the technology was there, would we not consider what's going on in the island of Cyprus? The other question that revolves around thinking about fitting islands into this larger scenario is how we might look at these crossings. So in what direction are people crossing? And what potential interactions or multiple interactions might there be on an island like this with several coastlines that are relatively close to land? And there are other things that figure into that sea currents that make some of these more likely than others, but at this point we're not really at the case where we can rule any of them out. And so I've really been trying to think about placemaking beyond the mainland. So thinking about the island of Cyprus and what this might be able to tell us about human environment, human landscape dynamics, particularly with some of these potential first settlers. And I'll talk about this first settler idea in a moment. And two points that I'm gonna come back to later on include thinking about transported landscape and landscape learning to frameworks which I found really helpful for trying to contextualize this. Many of you have seen this slide before in talks that I've given where what I wanna make the point of is we've put a lot of effort into thinking about during this 10,000 years of the Epipaleolithic, the various things that hunter-gatherer groups have been doing, which in many ways demonstrate that these hunter-gatherers have been engaged in settling down, in developing new technologies, domesticating plants and animals, creating very elaborate social networks, networks of symbolic communication much, much longer than we've originally given them credit for, but that they've been happening on their own individual independent trajectories and timelines. The one thing we really haven't put into this picture yet anywhere where we've been working in the Epipaleolithic and the Mediterranean Sea is how seafaring fits into this, both technologically and in terms of human environment interactions. And so we're left with many of these lovely colorful musings of seafaring capabilities without really any of the data to go along with the how, the why, the what, the when and those sort of things. One of my collaborators in Cyprus, one of my co-PIs, has really spearheaded some of this work in trying to find good, dateable sites that will give us these indications of Stone Age sailors as he calls them. And he's recently published a book focused on his work at this one site in Cyprus called Acrotiri Atacremnos, but contextualizing it within our larger understanding of what's going on in the Mediterranean Sea. So coming back to Christine's point about why I chose to work in Cyprus, yes, part of it is that it is a lovely island, very, very different than the landlocked desert I am used to working in. So there are indeed many, many beautiful beaches, but I wanna point out that there's also much more to the island than that. So it actually has a huge diversity of different landscapes which features into some of the considerations that these early settlers would have grappled with when arriving on the island, including a very mountainous inland center part of the island here. And you can see what some of these mountains look like and they even get regular snow in the winter time. So much like we can just hop up to Tahoe in the winter and within a few hours be skiing and snowboarding and then back at the ocean a few hours later, you can do a similar thing, although on an even shorter time scale in Cyprus. Cyprus is famous for a number of different things, including its beaches. It's also the mythical birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and a number of other things. It's a birthplace of halloumi cheese, very delicious cheese, but it also has a number of natural resources which have made it very, very attractive to settlers throughout history and prehistory, including in particular timber in these very forested uplands, as well as copper. It's a huge area for copper mining. It has been throughout prehistory, as you can see by this copper ingot which is actually fashioned in the shape of an oxide. What we know about Cypriot archaeology is the number of ancient civilizations that have called this place home, so it has a very early evidence for, for example, Mycenaean settlements about 3,500 years ago, the Phoenicians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Romans, ancient Greeks, Byzantines, Venetians, Ottomans, and British. And so a lot of people who found Cyprus very attractive for a long period of time and a number of very fascinating and really spectacular archaeological sites to go along with that. What I've not talked about here is one of the big themes in Cypriot prehistory. So thinking about the Calcolithic and the Bronze Age of the island is when we might think about there emerging a Cypriot identity, something that makes Cyprus as an island culturally different and unified compared to the surrounding area. And there's actually relatively decent evidence that this starts perhaps by the end of the Neolithic, certainly by the Calcolithic, with the appearance of commonalities in settlement and subsistence, as well as iconography and symbolic representations across the entire island. So for example, things like this star-shaped necklace that I have and these plank figurines and cross figurines that appear at every site that dates to the Calcolithic, for example, across the island as representing the beginnings of a unified, culturally Cypriot identity. And then the question becomes, at least for me, what was before that? How can we look at the archaeological record before this idea of having a unified identity and what does that mean for people interacting within the island and then of course with the island and various parts of the larger mainland? Oh, and I forgot this lovely image. This is actually a shipwreck, a Mazato shipwreck, a very famous shipwreck that's just off the coast of where I am doing research. So if we look at these earlier periods that predate this idea of a Cypriot identity, we can kind of lay out a timeframe that looks like this. So we have a pottery Neolithic, which I'm actually not going to talk about here. Sorry, Kevin, skipping over the pottery Neolithic. There's this gap, this period where we don't really know what's going on. And there's in fact another one right here, which I'll come to in a moment. The kind of interesting thing is that when we look back at this Neolithic prehistory, there's still a lot that we don't know about. There are things like the Akrotiri phase, which is essentially represented by one site, which I'll talk about in a moment. But largely what we've understood from the Neolithic come to this Kirokitea phase and is based on the discovery and excavation of what is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the site of Kirokitea in southern Cyprus, which has this fantastically huge site occupied from the seventh millennium to about the fourth millennium, but really intensively in the seventh and sixth millennium. Roughly translates, so Kiro roughly translates to hog or pigs, so the place where pigs are raised is what it's interpreted as. And there's a lot of evidence for raising of cattle and pigs and sheep and other Neolithic-like livestock. One of the really interesting things about this time period is that aside from not just Kirokitea, but a number of other Kirokitean-like sites, you have what's often interpreted as kind of a fully formed Neolithic package. So there's a suite of plants, a suite of animals, similarities in material culture that you see at a number of sites, but it's not exactly the same throughout the island, so not like what we see in later periods. And in fact, there's a large reconstructed village of Kirokitea here, so a lot of these circular houses are reconstructed to look something like this. Another example not far away is the site of Calavasos Tenta, which is I think very ironic. Tenta was the name given the site, but it also has this very large conical tent over top of it here that protects the mudbrick architecture underneath, a mudbrick and stone architecture, which is really, really quite impressive. And a little reconstruction here. I always made fun of my mom whenever we went traveling around, taking pictures of the signs of things, so she would remember what it was, and then I was really glad that I took that picture while I was there. So the idea is that we have an early Neolithic or what we thought until recently was an early Neolithic site that arrived as like a Neolithic package. So the idea that everything arrived on the island at once already has this kind of fully Neolithic way of life. What we're now understanding is that over the last couple of decades there's a lot more going on in the earlier part of the Neolithic, what we call the PPNA and the PPNB. Which actually show a lot of parallels, but also some differences to what we see in the Levantine coast. So what we see along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, so to the east of the island of Cyprus. And we know this earlier PPNA and PPNB from a number of different sites around the island. You'll note that although I have one dot here in the north, Cyprus is still very much culturally divided between the Turkish north and the Greek south. And so archaeology is done very different in those two places. And so for all intents and purposes, oops. For all intents and purposes, the north is still, so from here up, the north is still much of an unknown when it comes to these early Neolithic sites. Most Turkish archaeology in the north part of Cyprus is focused on much later periods with very different research questions in mind. So if we look at some of these sites in the south, you can see we're starting to fill in the map. What I wanna point out is that a lot of these are coastal sites, but not all of them, which is quite important that some of our earliest sites are actually not right on the coast. Our PPNB sites are really quite extensive in architecture, look a lot like some of these later Neolithic sites, but also with some important differences. We do have domesticated cattle and domesticated sheep at these PPNB sites, as well as pretty extensive site furniture. For example, the digging of wells at many of these sites. My collaborator, Alan Simmons, who I mentioned, has been working at the site of I New York. It's very recently one of these inland, basically up in the mountains, Neolithic sites, which is probably an industrial site rather than an occupation site, but does show a wide range of domesticated plants and animals that were present at the site itself, including wheat, a number of other domesticated cereals, pigs, and cattle in particular. And you can see an overview shot of the excavations here, which were taken by a drone. You can still do drone survey in Cyprus, which you cannot do in Jordan, which is very frustrating. And you can see some of these very extensive and elaborate stone buildings, often with stone pavements, that characterize the site of I New York. And some of the finds that we have from the site here, including very rare and not very well preserved, possibly early ceramic vessels, and human remains that are also found at the site, both adults and infants. I mentioned domestic cattle, as well as domesticated plants. If we look earlier on, the PPNA in Cyprus, our evidence is becoming increasingly more elusive. So we're talking about 9,000, 10,000 years ago right now. The sites are not these very large, substantial stone constructions, but still encompass semi-circular or circular buildings. We find them on both coastal and upland sites. And what's quite interesting, both in the PPNB and the PPNA, as I mentioned, is the really close parallels that we have in material culture to what we see in the Levant. So looking at these arrowheads, for example, these look at home at any PPNA site that you would find in the Southern Levant, where I've been working for the last two decades. Very interestingly, one of our best-known PPNA sites in the area is the site of Iocaianus, and it has a number of these stone platforms and these characteristic PPNA lithics, but also has the only dated epipaleolithic, stratified epipaleolithic occupation underneath at about 12,000 years ago. So very good hints that at this inland site, we have some of our earliest occupations at the island. Here's an example of one of the PPNA stone platforms. So the epipaleolithic occupations are below that. The last site that I'm gonna mention before I get to our survey work is the site of Akrotiri at a Kremnos. As I'm discovering, moving to a new area, the site names for sites in Cyprus are very long and cumbersome to say because the tradition is that you have the local village name first and then you have the name of the site afterwards. So Akrotiri is the nearby village and Akrotiri is the particular area or particular site. Also excavated by my co-director Alan Simmons, so you can see he's played a heavy hand in our understandings of the very earliest occupations of Cyprus, and a site that he ended up excavating by happenstance, not intentionally, but came with a company, this is a military base right now, and so in fact the local RAF, it's a British military base, the local RAF actually had him come and look at this outcrop area where they were finding bones basically washing into the ocean. Not the most accessible place to get to. So he did excavations here several decades ago and then renewed them in 2009. The big questions were was this even a site? It was just this collection of massive bones, as you can see right here, and you can see what they've excavated right here, and this is an excavator student holding one of the very large hippopotamus, pygmy hippopotamus mandibles that they found at the site. And so the question was really, was this an archeological site? Excavations showed that yes it was, in fact there's very, very secure context of stone tools associated with these pygmy hippobones, and a range of other non-domesticated species as well. And then of course what was the relationship between these stone tools and the hippo remains? And after numerous years of excavations, over 70 radiocarbon dates, details about the stratigraphy which I'll talk about in a moment, it was established that these stone tools were actually related to the hippobones. So they were part of the same intact deposits, and it brought back questions of what was the relationship between humans and these large megafauna, the only large megafauna that were on the island at the time, and why do we have no sites following this that actually have hippobones on them? So this is the only site where we see this extensive use of hippobones. And so what was the potential hand that humans had in the extinction of these large island megafauna? I mentioned before the stratigraphy. So we in fact have two cultural layers separated by an intact sterile layer. This one very, very rich in hippobones, and you can see some of them eroding out here, and you can see another image of it here, associated with stone tools, and then much fewer of these hippobones. So a second occupation of the site where we have a massive decrease in the amount of hippos still present, but much less so, and then very obvious cultural interaction. So potentially showing even over time at this area, the decrease or disappearance of these remains. And just to give you an idea of the stratification of the site here, so very well intact and well dated site, linking to these associations, including with hearts and very definite cultural material associated with it. And so the big question is, what was the relationship between these pygmy hippos and people? And you can see this person here hunting the pygmy hippo with the current interpretations being that people probably played a big role in their extinction. And in fact, you can find very rare instances of cut marks on some of these hippobones. And so we could think of a lot of potential reasons for island extinctions. Of course, I've already highlighted that a very likely scenario was humans in the case of Cyprus, but, oh, sorry, that went too fast. But you can also think of other potential climatic or ecological stressors that would have played a role in these extinctions. But of course, as we know, humans are very, very impactful everywhere they go, particularly in islands that humans have colonized. So the three horsemen of prehistory, I guess, men, rats, and dogs, and the impact that they had. So we know, for example, that right when we get the appearance of people on the island, we start to see the extinction of large and mini-medium-bodied mammals, large-bodied herbivores, mini-terrestrial birds. And then we see very major changes in habitat that change the range of particular species and the disappearance of forests that probably relate to early human occupation. So what I wanna talk about in the last bit here, after that fairly lengthy prelude to set the stage, is what our interest in working in Cyprus is. So I've already talked a little bit about some of the potential connections between looking at epipylethic groups in the mainland, particularly in the southern Levant, and Cyprus. But there are some interesting questions that come out of this movement of people that relate back to those two themes that I mentioned on transported landscapes and landscape learning. So here I wanna talk about what is this big unknown and what people have already, even though we have one potential date from one site that I mentioned, labeled as what we might think of as a pre-acrotiri phase. So the acrotiri phase is known only by the site I just mentioned, the hippocyte of acrotiri at a creminose. So it's still a largely unknown phase. And what we're more interested, or at least I'm more interested, is what may come before that. And so of course this brings us to thinking about what types of questions would be involved in thinking about the first settlers to Cyprus. So thinking about questions of how. And there are many different possibilities, all of which involve seafaring by the way. So there are many different ways that you could get from the mainland surrounding the island of Cyprus to the island itself. But some of those are very unlikely considering ocean currents. Or some of those would be easy to get to the island, but very difficult to get back again. And so those are things to think about when we think about some of the routes and which of these possible seafaring technologies would be more appropriate from whichever coast you may have set off from and whichever sea currents you may have to deal with. We know today from the media, very unfortunately that crossing the Mediterranean in any way is a very, very difficult thing to do. And it would have been so in the past as well. And so while it's very nice to kind of wax lyrical about what some of these crossings might have looked like, they may not have been as idyllic as we see here. Especially when we consider what early settlers brought with them to the island of Cyprus. So we know that humans had a really heavy hand in the extinction of pygmy hippo, pygmy elephant, and a number of other species. I didn't mention there were pygmy elephant on the island as well. But they brought things with them. They brought plants and animals with them. And so we also have to think about the logistics of doing that. I'm gonna come back to this idea of transporting things with them in a moment. But one thing I want to point out is that there are logistics in terms of the seafaring technologies that would have been involved in bringing plants and animals from one place to another. Very unlikely that you would bring things like adult sized cattle with you. And instead we could think about bringing juveniles, but you'd have to bring a number of them. You have to wait for them to mature, to have a breeding population. And so we're also talking about a back and forth rather than just one initial settling of the island. And the connections that we see in material culture over time also substantiate that idea of a back and forth. We can also think about some of the questions of why. Maybe it related to ecological pressures from the mainland, climate change, associated with the younger dryists, over exploitation of forests, over grazing, which we know is becoming an issue at this time in the mainland. Perhaps social pressures associated with some of these newly established large settlements in the mainland. So things like overcrowding and urban blight. We start to see the appearance of very large sites in Syria and in Turkey as well as in other areas. The urge to explore the unknown. We shouldn't rule out some of these pull factors of moving to the island of Cyprus rather than thinking just about push factors. And thinking about some of these pull factors, Cyprus does have some unique resources that are not easily found elsewhere, including timber and copper that I mentioned already, as well as this particular mineral called picrolyte, which you find made into statues across the island and exported off of the island as well. And I mentioned the idea of a back and forth. And it seems like given the connections and material culture from the earliest inhabitants of the island all the way through the Neolithic, that rather than having a kind of Neolithic Noah's Ark, we would instead think about, sorry, apparently that was timed, systematic, organized, and back and forth crossings instead. And just to highlight this point here, this is actually a hotel on the island of Cyprus in the shape of Noah's Ark, which I thought was quite funny. So my project to finally get to this is focused on some of these early or ancient explorers on Cyprus. So what do some of these very early sites look like? We have some tantalizing clues along the coast as well as inland, but we don't really have a good sense of whether they might be all considered small and ephemeral or whether there might be any larger base camps. I should also note that there's a good chance some of these sites are underwater. And so in future, we plan to build an underwater component into this work. So doing some diving right off of the coast, looking for some of these mesolithic or epipaleolithic sites. Again, we know they're both coastal and inland. Are they different? How are they connected to each other? And so we're operating under the premise that I think makes sense, given our current understanding of epipaleolithic groups across the region that these hunter-gatherers would have had knowledgeable and nuanced uses of landscape and would have been very capable of adapting to both coastal and inland life on the island very quickly and probably had a very large hand in landscape construction and management from their arrival on the island, perhaps first unintentionally, but also intentionally not long afterwards. Thinking about some of the technological innovations that would have allowed travel to and from the mainland and to explore new regions. So looking at potential of watercraft, ecological management, and the idea of constructing a built environment. So the area where we're focusing our research is the southern part of the southern coast of Cyprus. So along an area called the Tremethos River Valley. So from here on the coast and actually extending up and you can see it in this satellite image a bit better. This is my image, my photograph taken out of the airplane. You can see the wing of the airplane right here of the River Valley of Interest. You can see it's one of many that drain towards the coast. All of them coming from this central Trudos Mountains, the mountainous center of the island. And this is the path of the Tremethos here. So it's one large river actually that is the merging of several smaller upland rivers right about here. And the Tremethos in the mountains at its mouth is quite a substantial body of water. When you get further towards where it drains into the sea, it becomes much, much smaller and diminutive today and is almost a dry river bed by the time you get to the coast itself. So it actually outlets on the coast right about here. Not very visible when we're surveying. These are two of my colleagues here from last summer surveying along that coastline. Some previous work has already been done throughout the River Valley by my co-directors. One of the reasons why this project is so easy to do right now is that we're super top heavy. We have four PIs on the project, of which I'm one of them, two of whom have been working in Cyprus for decades now. So writing grants, for example, is really easy when you have four people who can just write it altogether and get it done. It's the easiest I've ever written a grant application before. And we don't have any students involved in the project yet. So it's super easy to manage right now. But we hope that will change in future. So the work that's been done previously has been surveying along the Tremethos River Valley. What we focused on last spring as part of the Stahl Funded Award that I received is looking at the mouth of the river right here. And we have a number of questions, first of which relate to landscape use. So how is the landscape constructed and managed through a variety of different practices? Why did Epi Paleolithic explorers come to Cyprus? What did they do to modify, manage, and maintain these landscapes, aside from lead to the extinction of pygmy hippos and the introduction of specific plants and animals? What can we say about movements, both within and through these landscapes? So where were people settling, per se, and where were they not? How do these movements relate to land and sea? So can we also talk about sieve movements around the coast of the island, for example? What do these movements tell us about larger regional networks and motivations for exploration? So how do we connect this back to the mainland specifically? And were these early seafarers, constant travelers, maybe briefly setting foot on Cyprus and then leaving again? Or were they relatively permanent from the outset? And how did they get across the Mediterranean Sea, thinking specifically about watercraft? And then the last kind of group of questions that we have revolve around technology, thinking about parallels or no parallels between the mainland and Cyprus itself. So what technologies would have been needed to traverse land and sea? Obviously, sea craft is one of those, although evidence for boats, for example, is essentially lacking throughout the Mediterranean Sea. The earliest evidence that we have for seafaring, so to speak, actually come from the Mesolithic of Britain, but that's as close as it gets. And so in the rest of the Mediterranean, we don't really have good evidence until really the Bronze Age. Again, what were the technological innovations and associated social contexts that would have allowed for exploration in these new environments and the establishment of these settlements? So the survival in new environments. And then how does what we see on Cyprus relate technologically to surrounding areas? And what does it tell us about these social networks that I've been interested in for quite a while? So our work, sorry, previous work has actually focused on these upland areas, which I'm not going to talk about here. Instead, I want to focus on the work we did last summer, where the Tremethos River Valley, and you can see it right here, empties into the ocean. And so we were actually living in this village over here and surveying up and down this coast in various plots of land that you can see some of them labeled here. Yes, there is indeed a camel park right here and the kahuna. I don't know why it's named after a Hawaiian big chief. Kahuna Surfhouse Restaurant, which serves great fish down here. The place where we stayed was also very fantastic. I put this up there mainly, so those of you coming with me to Jordan this summer can keep this in mind when we're in Jordan. It looks nothing like this when we were in Jordan. Thank you, Lisa. So yeah, just. So we stay in a vacation rental, which has a lovely pool, as you can see here, and a fantastic restaurant in the village that we eat at, so we don't even cook for ourselves. Sorry, guys. That serves very lovely local Cypriot wine. So the hardships of working in Cyprus are certainly one of its big draws. But I have to say, the payoffs are relatively modest compared to what we're excavating at Harana. So we spent about two weeks surveying up and down that little area that I showed you along the coast, basically surveying, well, not fields as they look like this, which is the main crop grown in this area wheat, which I should note was brought in by Neolithic farmers, one of those crops, but instead surveying those fields that had already been plowed. And so we're surveying bear or near to bear ground, and you can see two of my colleagues and myself surveying these polygons that we've laid out ahead of time, basically doing some basic ground walking and marking artifacts wherever we found them, collecting them if they were diagnostic, not collecting them if they weren't diagnostic. Unlike Jordan, where we can export material and bring it back here for analysis, we can't do that in Cyprus. So we have to be very careful about what we collect and what we don't, given the timeframe that we have for analyzing material and the very real limits of the storage capacities of the Department of Antiquities offices where all our material has to go at the end of every season. And as much as I love the lithics that I look at in the epipyliolithic, the museum really rates them as fairly low priority for keeping compared to some of the other material culture that you get from later periods here. We do find a chip stone tool, tools as well as ground stone that you can see here. One of the problems that we really found in doing the survey work is that unlike in previous survey projects where farmers would actually deep till the soil, which turns up prehistoric buried material to the surface, that is actually against the law now. So the Department of Agriculture has instituted new practices which actually make deep till plowing against the law. So you can only do shallow tilling, which is fantastic for preserving the soils of Cyprus and great as a larger agricultural practice, but is terrible for discovering paleolithic material in these fields. And so we actually spent a fair amount of time right at the water's edge, where we have these beautiful sections that preserve the buried traces of these early paleolithic and, sorry, epipyliolithic and neolithic sites. And so we, in some cases, we're walking right along the mouth of the river, looking at some of these exposed sections for material, and then following that up, going inland where it was possible to survey. Yes, we were indeed surveying by people who were hanging out on the beach swimming, and some of the material that we found is actually encased in this kind of sea rock that you can see here. So great preservation, but not very logistically feasible to excavate, but also points us to the idea that we may also really need to be looking underwater for some of these sites right along the coast. And just to give you an idea of the extent of some of these sections that you can see here, we have two examples. What I hope, or what I would like to point out is that you have the modern kind of gray, weekly developed soil on the surface here. You also have a paleosol, a Holocene paleosol right here, and an earlier paleosol here, which is where we're actually finding epipyliolithic material eroding out of. So there is a lot of potential but it may be very, very deeply buried. Even at the coast here, it's very deeply buried. You can see our excitement by finding one very nice diagnostic microlith here eroding out of one of these sections. So this is myself and my co-director Sally. And again, just to show the extent of some of these sections here. And these sections are showing pretty elaborate depositional sequences, which is really exciting for me as a geoarchaeologist and highlighting the role that geoarchaeology is gonna play in piecing together and locating some of these early sites. So you can see some of the lithics eroding out of this lower paleosol here and a few examples right here. Here's one, here's another one, there's another lithic here. There's some pottery there too. Still have that overburden to deal with. But you can see in this instance some of that very nice, well-developed soil. And these sections appear again and again in many of the coastal areas that we were surveying. Again, containing these microlithic lithics in these well-developed and well-preserved paleosols that are fairly deeply parried. And some of which we actually needed to be in the water to be able to assess the sections themselves. And to give you an idea what some of the material looks like, probably looks like nothing particularly exciting to you, except for maybe a few of you who work with me at Harana. But we are finding really beautiful, very typical epipalithic cores that would look at home to what we see in the Levant 12 to 15,000 years ago. So very reassuring that we are actually finding these epipalithic sites once we look for them. And using the georcheological evidence, particularly the occurrence and location of paleosols as cues as to where to look. There's another site nearby, the site of Nisi Beach, which we haven't worked at, but has actually been published fairly recently. So we were working right here. This is Nisi Beach over here. It's a very big tourist attraction. So the opening picture that I showed, I actually took on the beaches here at Aya Napa, a very famous resort area where you can go there and see lots of pasty white tourists and very small bikinis with dance music pumping in the middle of the day. But this site shows similar type of lithics to what we're finding right here. Unfortunately, they're all in this sea rock, which has now been uplifted above the level of the water. So this is actually a really steep cliff behind us here. This is my collaborator, Alan Simmons, who I mentioned excavated the other two sites, the Hippo site and Ias Yorkis that I talked about. And the lithics here again, very typically epipalithic, looking very at home to what we see in the Levant, which is quite interesting because it parallels what we talked about in the PPNA and PPNB in terms of the interactions between those areas. So that's the cover shot I showed you, which comes from the beach. Although Nisi Beach now is raised above the sea level, we could imagine that 15,000 years ago, it may have been a kind of landing scenario that would have looked very attractive, something like this. And so I come back to the two topics just as I wrap up that I mentioned I was gonna talk about the idea of transported landscapes and landscape learning and how that fits into our project. So landscape learning is a concept that was introduced by Marcy Rockman for a very great paper, a little bit earlier in other contexts, but a very great paper in 2013, thinking about how we learn about the environment and how ecological knowledge is gained and transmitted within groups. And so this is something that I think plays a big role in how we think about arriving on the island of Cyprus, figuring out what resources are edible and inedible, what's useful, what's not useful, where you find Flint to make stone tools, where you get fresh water, how you move inland, what are routes to follow and what are areas to stay away from. And we could think of this in many ways as kind of a type of apprenticeship where individuals and groups would learn about an environment through observation, imitation, and the repeated use of information and how that would be transmitted within and between groups, particularly as you arrive in a new place and get to know that new place. So it's in many ways a unique kind of apprenticeship, the apprenticeship of the environment, as Marcy Rockman calls it. It includes knowing about many different types of knowledge. It is often tied to a larger social network of environmental information. It includes both adults and younger members of the population as they have to learn what they can and can't do or where they can and can't go or what they can and can't eat. And it can take really long time frames to acquire this knowledge. It's gathered by individuals, but it's transmitted within and between groups. So it contributes to these larger experiences of, this is how we live in this particular context. So not just how we live, but how we live in this particular environment or ecology. And so we could think about how people understand their relationship with the environment today, a traditional Cypriot relationship with the environment, which often revolves around certain plants and animals, particularly domesticated plants and animals, including the grape. But then the question becomes before all of these things arrive on the island or as these things are arriving, how are they integrated into local ecologies? Which will include locational knowledge, limitational knowledge, as well as social knowledge. And then the last point that I wanna make, I've already kind of mentioned, comes with thinking about how you would have learned about a landscape or how you would have shaped that landscape as you brought things to the island. So although we don't have a Noah's Ark scenario where everything arrives as kind of a neolithic suite of material, kind of like the scenario that's reconstructed for movements across Polynesia with the canoe plants or canoe crops, but we do have to think about when a variety of different plants and animals arrived on the island and what the integration of those would have been on local ecologies, including things like bringing about the extinction of pygmy hippos. And so things like deer, very large body deer, mouflon, red fox, goat, pigs, dogs, cats, all arrived at various points very, very early on in the settling of the island, let alone things like wheat and grapes and other plants, grapes that we see here. I think I'm actually, given time, gonna skip through this part and just leave it at that and say we still have a lot of questions, but we have some really tantalizing ways to go about addressing these questions, including going back this fall to do some excavations of some of these areas where we were finding, so deep excavations of these areas where we were finding epipelulithic material. So thank you all, yeah. So, great talk, you're really a great project. So why did you and your total PIs choose the termothos valve that you're launching? And I noticed that it actually looks down towards Jordan. It does. And I'm afraid that has a role in terms of how you're kind of connecting cypress with Jordan. Yeah, so for two reasons. Both of my co-directors who've been working on cypress for a number of years, Alan Simmons and Sally Stewart, have surveyed in other areas. And although they found potential material there, it's been less promising that it was in buried, datable deposits. So most of it has been eroded beach contexts, like the Nisi Beach one that I showed where you can just walk along the surface and see it on this bare sea rock, basically. And the other reason is because it does kind of face the area that we're particularly interested in. There are some barriers related to sea currents that make it a particularly challenging crossing that way. But not impossible. There's also a large part, especially in the North Coast, which for geopolitical reasons is impossible to work in. So, yeah. So that makes the South Coast just practical, as well as the fact that because of all of these large river valleys that drain to the coast there from the mountains, you have a lot of deeply buried terraces which have good potential to preserve material. Not the exposure of those sections. The other thing that I didn't say that is a particular challenge is there are still big off-limits military zones in cypress. And so, if you noticed, there was a big gap. And one of my maps up here, which is just a no-go zone. So this area right here, there's areas that were surveyed here. And then this is not because, we didn't bother looking there. It's because it's still mined. Yeah. Sorry, Meg. Yeah, I think the learning part, I'm learning new landscapes and so forth is really important. And you're probably aware that there's been quite a bit of work by people who are thinking about how, at the end of the vice-tocene, we're the opening up of Northeastern Europe and moving into Scandinavia. So there's been a lot of work on how people learn those new landscapes and what they bring in and so forth, which is really, really very relevant. Yeah, and much of which, especially with changing sea levels, includes moving by boat, which is, yeah, definitely something I was thinking about when talking about cypress. Yeah. I can get you a fucking reference. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'm wondering about the native fauna that you described. And it seems like that lasted quite a long time after the first human arrival. Why were they destroyed? And if I understand you, it's like there's a distinct period where they got busy and destroyed everything. I mean, the pygmy hippos, yeah. And the pygmy hippos. It seems so. So it's early on, but it's not the earliest. So people didn't arrive on the island and basically wipe out pygmy hippos. There was some overlap, which probably would have related to discovering that they were easy to hunt and very tasty. And I'm sure there was more than just direct hunting that would have played a hand in this disappearance of pygmy hippos and other endemic species, for example. You know, at Akrotiri, there are no good, there's no good evidence for domesticated plants and animals. So there's other wild fauna, probably also endemic, although it's difficult to know because not a lot of work has been done on these early sites. Akrotiri is the only site from this phase. But it's later on in the PPNA and then the PPNB that we start to see the really wholesale arrival of a lot of other species. The cat, dog, deer, pig, cattle that I mentioned, fox. The interesting thing is people are bringing with them domestic animals and not domestic animals. So fox and deer were never domesticated in this area. There's lots of discussion about fox domestication and experiments in Siberia, but those are wild animals and those were brought to the island. So that raises some really interesting questions for thinking about the logistics of doing that and suggests that there's not this idea of bringing a whole bunch of different animals on one boatload over and then seeing what happens. But that there was a lot of back and forth, different species were probably brought at different times and we just don't have a good sense of how that plays out yet. How early people were bringing plants and animals over, what the earliest ones were and how they would have interacted with local fauna. The throughout this long area Cyprus, long period Cyprus was actually dominated by mainland cultures. Well, there's certainly as evidence of that later on. Later for sure, yeah. Well, we see parallels. We have a lot to say about how things go. It's possible. I mean, for the very first settlers of the island, whenever that was. I mean, if you talk to my colleague, Alan Simmons, given what has been found recently in a lot of these Greek islands, maybe you'll find Middle Paleolithic. People have claimed that so far for Cyprus, but it's not proven to be reliable. So it's possible that these epipaleolithic people that we know are coming over and leaving their stuff there and probably staying there and going back and forth and doing all kinds of complicated things, movements in the island and between the island and the mainland. But it's possible that there were people there before, whether or not they were still there when epipaleolithic groups arrived, who knows. But hopefully if we get a chance to dig some of these deeply buried sites, we'll be able to address some of those questions. Yeah, but it's not a particularly sexy period in Cypriot prehistory. The material culture is pretty unobtrusive and it's low visibility. It's not particularly nice to look at, maybe for lithic people like me. So I mean, there's just not a lot of people who are interested in these very, very early periods. People are interested in digging kind of the big architecture rich sites. And if I could just briefly tell you a little bit about the earliest, maybe in the end of all residents as well? You mean on Cyprus? Yeah. So there was a one handaxe, handaxe and air quotes that was reported from Cyprus several years ago that upon closer inspection, it's just a really beat up cobble that was found in a riverbed. So there's no evidence? There's none yet, no. Nothing that you could hang your hat on. But that doesn't mean that it couldn't be there. We know, as I tried to highlight at the beginning, we know in the end of all, we're moving around in pretty sophisticated ways throughout the Mediterranean Sea. So thank you very much guys.