 Good morning everyone and thank you for attending this very interesting session today. My name is Harry Barkskeva and before I start my presentation I'd like to take a moment and thank the EIA for organizing this wonderful conference. As you see on the screen the topic I'll be presenting today concerns the transition from the Calculative to the Bronze Age in Cyprus. And for those unfamiliar with the archaeology of the island this transition was accompanied by drastic changes in all facets of the material and immaterial culture ranging from pottery, representational art, and metals to architecture, burial customs, and everyday practices. The course of these changes and the mold they unfolded historically are the two core issues Cansforth explored. As this is a complex topic I've decided to break it down to three sections which include an introduction to the issue and the methodology employed followed by section and key results regarding chronology, pottery, and topography. The presentation will conclude with a synopsis of the novel theoretical argument proposed regarding the transition into history. Interestingly the topic has been under debate since the 40s and it goes without saying that it is time-wise impossible to present a full account of all the theories proposed. However it is possible to distinguish at least three general approaches that have been developed over the years. To begin with one group of researchers argues that the changes leading to the emergence of the bronze age were brought about mostly due to the action of exogenous actors that arrived on the island and gradually replaced the indigenous social cultural systems due to their technological superiority. At the end of this approach another group of archaeologists maintained up to a decade ago that all the changes observed during the transition can be attributed to the effect of intra-insular evolutionary processes that led to gradual self-transformation of the social cultural groups inhabiting the island. This past decade, due to the near definitive proof for the arrival of foreign populations on the island at the beginning of the early bronze age, we witnessed the appearance of the third approach that tries to fuse concepts from previous schools of thought and argues that this arrival triggered complex sets of interactions that brought about transformations of both indigenous and foreign social cultural systems and eventually led to the consolidation of what we would call the early bronze age coinage. Now all these models and theories despite their theoretical prowess face two important challenges. On the one hand they assume that the events leading to the emergence of the bronze age are largely unilinear. On the other hand there are still many things we don't know particularly for the period before the bronze age which naturally leads to the formation of new questions. And the first necessary step to asking questions is the construction of a suitable framework to support their answers. In this case I've built a custom database capable of handling, storing, curing and distributing for statistical and spatial analysis all the different interrelated types of information. The second step was to analyze in depth the available archaeological literature. Thousands of volumes were examined and a select 2,500 publications were eventually found to contain useful data but they also revealed several weaknesses in approaching the specific matter. Such a legume regards our level of knowledge on several prime bronze age sites, the system of chronology, the pottery typology for the entire iron and the lack of modern spatial analysis for the calcolific. As a consequence these issues determine the strategy employed to approach the matter, which included the re-establishment of the temporal framework, the delineation of the calcolific pottery typology at an island-wide scale, the reassessment of relative dates for hundreds of sites, the analysis of data in terms of space and time and finally the synthesis of the new knowledge in an effort to investigate more effectively the transition to the bronze age. Before going into the new theoretical model proposed I will attempt to deliver some of the curious also the separate strands of research on the topic. Unfortunately time will not allow an in-depth explanation of how the results were reached but they are crucial for providing some context for the new model. Starting with matters of chronology it is observed that the advent of Bayesian modeling in the past decade has promoted consensus among researchers concerning the temporal framework of the island. In order to re-validate the results of recent studies I gathered the available radiocarbon data for the island, checked their intrinsic properties and modeled them by several differently configured models in OXCAL. These models were then cross-ploded and compared and after assessment they finally produced reliable temporal boundaries for all periods. As in every rule however there is an exception. In this case the models did not return acceptable results for the termination between the late calcolific and the filiac culture phase that marks the beginning of the early bronze age because we have too few and significantly overlapping dates that span this transition. In order to remedy this situation I turned to a crucial element that chronometric models cannot take into account for analysis namely pottery. More specifically there is a type of pottery called Dread-Polished Filiac which forms an integral part of the new cultural material package brought by populations arriving on the island at this time. We know that this way represents island-wide informity and comes from a limited number of production centers in the north that date to the filiac but has also been found in layers of the calcolific settlement of Kishonera Mosfilia in southwest Cyprus. As such I re-established the Stradigraphy of the Latin Resettlement traced the Dread-Polished Filiac and established connections with the radiocarbon dates which allowed the definition of the filiac culture boundary between 2600 and 2550 BC. In turn this led to a significant revision of the chronological framework as it proves that the late calcolific ended in the north much earlier than it did in the south and west while it also hints to the fact that the filiac represents a phenomenon that is spatially and temporally confined to the northern half of the island. Turning to another duo of subjects examined namely pottery and hematopography it is noted that prior to this study the topology of calcolific pottery was developed on a per site or region basis and was based mostly on static stick-up tributes a tendency that led to the overproduction of terminology and non-comparability of the assemblages. To tackle this issue I re-examined assemblages from close to 40 benchmark sites around the site noted attributes regarding fabric, surface and shape established by a statistical analysis on island-wide typology based on manufacturing technology and blind tested it to validate its applicability. The typology merges several of the types proposed by earlier typologies in two overarching groups sets as the basis of evolution to technology of manufacture instead of style and is finally cross-correlated to the radiocarbon chronology. Eventually the new typology was utilized as a means to evaluate the specific dating of some 450 pre-bronze age sites while the ceramic assemblages of about 150 sites surveyed by the Cyprus survey which is a large-scale survey project of the 50s and 70s were also re-examined and redated. As a result of the above endeavors the map of prehistoric Cyprus is no longer dotted by sites dating vaguely from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age but we now have period-specific maps for the middle and late apocalyptic as well as the filiaphas which allows a much more nuanced examination of human topography in space and time. Having elucidated matters of chronology, ceramic typology and topography became possible to integrate old data into a novel theoretical argument regarding the transition to the bronze which on the one hand transcends the unilinear paradigm and on the other hand renders untenable the notion of cultural uniformity during the filiac culture phase. In order to understand what happened on this transition however it is necessary to take a step back in time and look first at what happens on the island the immediately preceding periods. Starting with the middle apocalyptic a total of 106 sites were detected which are concentrated mostly at the north central west and south parts of the island. The pottery analysis identified use of common manufacturing technologies and stylistic treatments of pottery across the sites while the bibliographic study noted similarities in all aspects of the material and material culture of the sites. These results fully justified the characterization of the middle apocalyptic as a culturally uniform period where egalitarian small-sized settlements isolated from the outside world peacefully coexisted on the island. These situations changes dramatically in the late apocalyptic which is characterized by the breakdown of the cultural coining and a marked increase in regionalism the onset of metallurgy and craft specialization accompanied by the emergence of social inequality, surplus storage and external trade. A total of 86 sites date to the late apocalyptic and generally lying similar settings as those in the middle apocalyptic. The pottery analysis indicates experimentation with new igneous and bentomidic clay sources while firing technologies also improved. These developments coincide with the recipients of extractive metallurgy and may point to links between the two as it is in this period and an increase in sites situated closer to copper sources is attested. Moreover the pottery of this period indicates the onset of extrinsular trade as relief decorations similar to pottery from Anatolia appears along with imports like fiance beads and spur-tangular pendants. Simultaneously few artifacts made of superior copper appeared sites in Jordan and Crete which hints to the role of the island as a minor player in the instrumented terminal trading networks. Perhaps the most radical development of this period however is the emergence of regional cultures expressed as different pottery traditions on the island. More specifically we can trace one tradition at the north-central part of the island producing red monochrome pottery with reduced interior or exterior surfaces. One at the south coast producing plain red monochromes and finally one in the west of the island that produces red monochromes with varying surface bearings and praising effects. The emerging regionalism of the late apocalyptic is considered a hard figure of social instability and from this point onwards each region seems to follow its own historical path. The literal term in Metiares becomes highly relevant in this case for the beginning of the fifth year culture as new population migration episodes interrupt an ongoing process of social transformation that started in the late apocalyptic. The new populations seem to arrive from Anatolia and carry with them totally new types of material cultural as well as new technologies and habits. Their appearance around 10600 BC coincides with a period of turmoil for Anatolia which may have acted as a push factor for them. Turning to the mode of migration it is proposed that these populations do not come as peaceful migrants but rather as colonists carrying advance technologies and weaponry. Their attempt however was most likely not fully successful so we may label it a failed colonization attempt. This argument is based on the following three elements. The radio carbon dates indicate a broad overlap between the late apocalyptic and the phila which means that the new social system on the island did not replace the indigenous systems in operation. Two there were numerous late apocalyptic sites in the north coast which is where the migrant populations made their first landfall. Nevertheless there are no late apocalyptic sites with phila culture pottery in the north which suggests that these sites were either abandoned or their inhabitants were violently displaced while the sites in the south continue to exist. Three there are many cemeteries but few settlements associated with the phila culture which hints to increase mortality for the migrant populations while the phila tombs are filled with significant quantities of metal weapons that potentially reflect increased violence. Despite not being able to expand significantly the migrant populations managed to establish what became a regional culture namely the phila culture attested at 21 sites in the central and north parts of the island. At the same time the indigenous populations continue to exist and resist the assimilation although certain sites did elect to conduct minimal trade with the new populations as exhibited by the limited phila pottery at Gissone Ramos phila. Nevertheless the passage of time probably eased the coexistence of the indigenous and migrant populations which likely led to an intensification of the inter-regional trade. Also after this initial period of uneasy coexistence a new period of complex interactions with the kings. In respect to these matters we have just started to scrap the surface but already there is evidence for bilateral cultivation entanglement and technological cultural transmission. Specifically the pottery analysis indicates that indigenous populations start to adopt technologies like better clay sorting and phila shapes in calcolithic fabrics while the migrant populations adopt stylistic elements like the reduction of vessels. Again there is no dominant cultural on the island no assimilation of one culture by another and no uniformity. The final outcome of this persistent and long lasting complex interactions in the parallel insistence on retention of cultural identity can be identified in the marked regionalism of the early Bronze Age which is a direct antecedent of the late calcolithic regional cultures plus the phila culture. As such the regional culture producing red polished with reduced interior exterior surfaces emerges of the north central parts of the island. A second regional culture operates at the south coast producing multiple red polished and finally a third regional culture develops in the west which produces mostly draught polished pottery. To sum up it is proposed that population migrations led to the emergence of the phila culture in the north and aided technological evolution of indigenous populations but never fully replaced or substituted. Whereas the indigenous regional cultures were already following the virgin historical trajectories from the late calcolithic onwards and with that I'd like to thank you for your attention.