 Hello and welcome to Ask an Archaeologist. I'm Nico Tripsovich, the host of today's show. Ask an Archaeologist is a series of live streamed interviews co-hosted by the Archaeological Research Facility and the PBA Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. In this series, UC Berkeley archaeologists and others who work with archaeological materials discuss their research and answer audience questions. For those of you joining us live today, you can post your questions in the live chat box that you can find adjacent to the YouTube video. So today we're delighted to be speaking to Professor Lisa Mahur once again for part two of her presentation. Welcome, Lisa. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. Yeah, welcome back. So Lisa Mahur is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. And so she'll be presenting part two of Rethinking Revolutions, new insights into prehistoric hunter-gatherers. And last time we spoke, you were telling us about your work in Jordan and I believe you were gonna set sail to the island of Cyprus. That's right. Yes, very apropos introduction. So yeah, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be back again. Apparently I have a lot to say on Rethinking Revolution. So thank you for giving me the chance to talk about the second project I've been working on, on this broader theme of trying to understand some of these early developments and early complexities amongst hunter-gatherers in Southwest Asia. So I'm just gonna share screen here and get this set up. There we go. So what I wanted to talk about today actually extends very nicely from my discussion last time on the research that I've been doing in Eastern Jordan, particularly looking at a few of the themes that I talked about last time that I've listed up here again. So particularly interested in human environment into relationships, especially thinking about what happens when people move to a new environment, a new landscape, a new location, not only how they get there, but also how they interact with the new plants and animals and spaces that they are now kind of immersed in. And then the other aspect is thinking about the creation of social landscapes. So of course it's very intriguing to think about how people would have interacted with new plant and animal species, but also how would they have interacted with other people, including the people that they traveled there with or just the people they traveled there with if they may have been some of the first inhabitants to a new place, such as we think for the island of Cyprus in the time period that I'm gonna talk about today. So moving directly to the work in Cyprus. One of the reasons why I started working in Cyprus after working in Jordan for over 20 years now is because there are so many interesting parallels between what we know about the early habitation of the island of Cyprus and what's going on in the mainland, so to speak, of Southwest Asia. And I actually went to Cyprus in 2016 for a conference and the first thing that really struck me about being there was how similar the archaeology was and the landscape was. And although I'm talking about a very early and still relatively unknown part of Cyprus's prehistory, the little bit that we do know shows some really, really striking and fascinating parallels in material culture in particular with what we see in Southwest Asia. And so in my work in Jordan, I had really been thinking at the time, and I still am, about how we can understand where the site of Harana, which I talked about last time, where it fits in the larger hunter-gatherer social landscape. And I've been trying to think about how hunter-gatherers move around and interact with other groups within a very large landscape. And so traveling to Cyprus really got me thinking what it would have been like for hunter-gatherers making those journeys to new places and maybe not being limited, as we had kind of previously assumed, not being limited by the presence of the Mediterranean Sea or at least a small stretch of it between the mainland and the island of Cyprus. And we know, for example, that Neolithic groups were traveling back and forth with some regularity, but we hadn't really gotten a good sense. And we are still, in many ways, don't have a great sense of what the earliest inhabitants, these kind of preceding the Neolithic, what these hunter-gatherers were doing on the island, how they were getting there, how often they were traveling back and forth. But we do know that the very early sites that we see, and this is what I'm gonna kind of expand upon over the next little while, show really strong similarities to sites on the mainland. And so this is what I was interested in exploring a little bit more. And it's not really a far-fetched concept at all, in part because so much recent research throughout the Mediterranean has showed that not only, of course, are Homo sapiens, very expert seafarers, and we know this, of course, extending well outside of the Mediterranean world, but even within the Mediterranean, there is now very, very good evidence for Neanderthals using watercraft technologies and traveling intentionally on a regular basis from parts of the mainland to in particular many islands in the Adriatic Sea and around Greece. And so a lot of Greek islands show evidence of Neanderthals coming to these islands and living there. We don't have particularly well-dated sites in these places, but suggesting based on the artifacts that we find there, around 250, maybe even 300,000 years ago. And so it's not kind of out of the realm of possibility to think that people were pretty extensively traveling through the Mediterranean Sea long before Neolithic farmers arrived on Cyprus, say eight or 9,000 years ago. And so, yes, we can think and imagine what some of these early seafaring voyages may have looked like. And we still have a lot of questions that are wrapped around these early trips, but we do know that they happened. And so the kind of precedent has already been set long before Homo sapiens moving around throughout the Mediterranean. And so if we go back, and for those who didn't tune into the first part, I'll mention this now, and for those who did this, perhaps my jog your memory, one of the things that I talked about was a real interesting phenomenon of early prehistory or early hunter-gatherer research is trying to find the earliest of something, the first evidence for groups practicing a particular behavior that then becomes very well entrenched in what we understand as modern behavior. And we usually, in this part of the world, or traditionally, not usually now, but we have traditionally drawn that line somewhere around the domestication of plants and animals, and when people settle down into permanent villages and expanded their social spheres and their technological and economic spheres from there. But of course, if we track a lot of these individual behaviors, and this is what I was pointing out in my part one, if we track a lot of these individual behaviors, we see that they all happen at different times, and most of them happen long before the so-called neolithic. And what this research in Cyprus is pointing out is that of course, another of these behaviors we can add to the list that's kind of missing from the one I talked about last time is seafaring. And we know that this happens long, long before any of the timeframe that's listed on this chart here, which is about 22,000 years is the earliest dates right here. Of course, we have seafaring, if we have seafaring with Neanderthals, long, long before this. And so we have to start thinking about some of the particular technologies and other social and economic practices that would go with being able to intentionally and knowledgeably move by water from one place to another. And what kind of archeological evidence we may be able to find for that. So, and there are many, many considerations when we start thinking about people moving before the neolithic from one location to another by sea. And here I've shown, oops, I'm sorry, I went back, there we go. So here I've shown a map of kind of the north eastern portion of the Mediterranean Sea, highlighting the island of Cyprus that you can see right here. Oh, sorry that I shouldn't use my mouse apparently. And you can see I've put arrows, of course, going in both directions because we assume that it was not simply a one-way movement. And in fact, people seem to have been going back and forth throughout time between multiple different locations on the mainland to the island. We don't actually know which of these routes may have been the kind of earliest route of people traveling from Southwest Asia to Cyprus. And in fact, it may have been all of them. All of them are possible or feasible. Of course, there's a lot of considerations that go into this that I'm not gonna talk about too much here, including what type of watercraft was being used, what the currents were like and what the coastlines were like for landing and of course, setting sail in each of those locations. And visibility, all of those kind of things filter into thinking about these earliest navigations from one place to another. But what I wanna highlight here is actually the point that we do know, which is that there were many crossing. So we're not just talking about a one-time, one-directional movement. These crossings were back and forth. They were intentional. They were systematic and they were organized. And so what this really means, if we come back to one of the points that I talked about again in part one, is that rather than seeing this idea of neolithic farmers bringing a package of plants and animals with them from mainland Southwest Asia to Cyprus around eight or 9,000 years ago, which for a long time was the narrative. Instead, we have hunter-gatherers moving back and forth and neolithic groups later on moving back and forth and bringing various aspects of the landscape with them, both to Cyprus and then from Cyprus back to the mainland. And this is really interesting because some of the animals, both plants, sorry, both plants and animals that we find on the island of Cyprus, we know are not indigenous to the island. They were actually brought there from the mainland by different groups. And they include both domesticated plants and animals, things like wheat and sheep and goat that were brought by neolithic farmers, but also wild plants and animals. Some of those animals include, for example, deer and fox that would have been brought either by neolithic or earlier hunter-gatherers, but they were animals that were never domesticated and that we don't find any evidence of even a management of these species in the mainland. So they were brought as wild animals to Cyprus and they were probably also wild animals in Cyprus. So it's really interesting to think about how these early groups were shaping the landscape of Cyprus right from the very beginning. And I'll talk about another aspect of that shaping as we kind of move along. Yeah, so can I ask how far is this of these crosses? What's the distance? Yeah, like the shortest one there. So the shortest distance is actually this one right here or depending on where exactly you leave the coast here, it can be here. This is where the currents are the calmest, but I believe the water is the deepest. So we really, we have no early sites up here is another interesting thing. But again, some of that may have to do with the current geopolitics of Cyprus. I think we're all pretty well aware. It's a very complicated country with a lot of issues around movement and access to conducting archeological work in the northern Turkish part of Cyprus versus the southern Greek part of Cyprus. And so it may well be that there are sites up here that we just don't know about yet. Maybe they haven't been discovered or they haven't been particularly well published. The only real sites that we know of are mostly down along the south coast and a little bit over here where research has been more intense, but also interestingly those sites show clear material culture connections with the mainland here. So we know there's definitely movement here even though that's one of the farther and not the easiest of crossings because of the way the water currents are there in the weather in this part of the Mediterranean. And then you had lower sea levels, so presumably slightly less. Lower sea levels, that's right. And in fact, that's an important point going forward is that sea levels at least along the south coast and it's different of course in different parts of the coast but along the south coast here we're about two kilometers offshore of what they are now. So probably a lot of these really early sites are gonna be submerged or partially submerged. At least the coastal sites. And that's actually something we're hoping to explore as we develop this project a little bit further doing some underwater surveying for these early sites. But they're very, very difficult to detect because most of what we have left for material culture are very small microliths, which are very small lithics and which are really hard to find underwater especially if they've sunk into some of the submerged sediments on the sea bottom. Yeah, but let me just take a moment to remind our viewers that they can post questions on our live chat feed there and I can present them to Professor Lisa and Maher. Great, thank you. So, and in fact, we know a lot about Cypriot archaeology from later periods. And just to kind of wet your appetite of some of Cyprus' pretty amazing archaeology I've shown some images here. You can see we have a range of time periods. These are some calcolific and neolithic remains that we find in various parts of the island. What we know about the earlier time periods is much less and I'm gonna talk about that in a moment. But I do wanna again point out that a lot of the archaeology of Cyprus is underwater archaeology. So it includes of course later period shipwrecks including the shipwreck that you can see right here which is just off of the coast of Mazatos which is the area where we're working in the southern part of the island. But probably also a lot of the earliest hunter gatherer sites may also be submerged. Not quite as deep as this, but significantly off coast enough that you need to do some underwater archaeology to access them. So there are only a few of these hunter gatherer sites that we know about and even fewer that are actually well dated. In fact, there's only one well dated hunter gatherer site which I'll talk about in a moment. Most of the sites look much like the one that we can see here at Nisi Beach which is located right on this peninsula here that you can see in the southeastern part of the island where you have essentially a kind of bare rock landscape where what is left of this very eroded surface is little pockets of sediment that contain these epipaleolithic like pieces which are usually small flakes or small bladelets that have a small amount of retouch on them. So they look very different from what we see in later period lithic technologies including neolithic lithic technologies and they most closely resemble micro lithic technologies including the Tufian technologies in the mainland in Southwest Asia. But you can see I'm standing in an area where I'm standing in one of these little pockets right here. So A, you can see how close to the coast they are now keeping in mind that this coast would have been two kilometers in this direction, a very shallow coastline here but still two kilometers out about 10,000, 12,000 years ago when they were probably created and a not particularly lovely place to be. This is actually very heavily eroded, jagged, sharp Aeolia night rock that doesn't make for a really great place to settle down but keeping in mind it's been eroded over the last 10,000 years or so. So what we get are these in essence these really, really eroded sites. So not great contexts for being able to track in situ activity areas or getting reliable dates. However, we are fortunate that one site that has been excavated by one of my collaborators on this project. So like my work in Jordan, which was a collaborative effort, my work in Cyprus is the same. So one of my co-directors is Danielle McDonald who I also work with in Jordan who's at the University of Tulsa. And then I have two other collaborators both of whom have been working in Cyprus for about 30 years now. One of them is named Sally Stewart and she's at the University of Toronto. She has been studying the earliest Neolithic occupations in Cyprus for several decades. And the other is Alan Simmons who is a professor emeritus at UNLD, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And he's also been working on Cyprus for several decades and he was actually the one to excavate this very famous site called Acrotiri at a Kremnos which as you can see by the dates here place it before the Neolithic. So it's in fact the earliest dated site on the island at about 12,000, almost 13,000 years ago. And again, keeping in mind this shoreline would be two kilometers out from what you can see here but even still this site was located on a fairly stark promontory. The site now you can access only by climbing down these ropes to a little ledge right here. The site's a rock shelter that is particularly well known for two reasons. One, it has in situ early hunter-gatherer remains including hearths and including a material that shows the remains of substantial and kind of prolonged activity including hunting the local endemic species that was around all over this part of the island when people arrived which is pygmy hippos. And so you can see some of the remains including this pygmy hippo bone right here with a lithic right beside it. So in very clear association we have these stones created by people as well as other objects. So here we have some of the lithics shell that's been clearly fashioned into beads and carved pieces of stone that are in association with hearths and with the burnt and unburnt butchered remains of these pygmy hippos. And in fact, there are large numbers of these pygmy hippos at the site that were excavated. So you can see here all of these little pieces are bones so we have basically a collection of the butchered remains of these pygmy hippos which are marks on some of the bones and then you can see what some of them look like. So this is a kind of standard size hand-held caliper and this is a pygmy hippo skull that you can see right here. So how big is a pygmy hippo? So I wonder if I know I didn't have a picture of it. So a pygmy hippo would probably be about up to your waist. Yeah, the waist of an average sized adult but they're hippos, they're pretty hefty little guys. Yeah, I've heard they're very aggressive, the most dangerous thing in the rivers of Africa. Yeah, again, we have no idea about these pygmy, the behavior of these pygmy hippos because very sadly, not long after people arrive on the island, they are extinct. And so there are pygmy hippos and pygmy elephants and dwarf elephants that were both found on the island of Cyprus that would have been their endemic when people arrived. However, they were not long for the island when people arrived. And so part of that may have been exposure to new predators as people brought animals with them, their loss of habitat, as people may have kind of encroached on their habitat, over hunting may have been one of those reasons, climate change may have been another. There's probably a lot of reasons why these pygmy hippos died out but it's also probably no coincidence that they died out very quickly after people arrived. They would have been sitting ducks, so to speak, for people when they arrived on the island as kind of prime targets because other than these guys, there's very few endemic large-bodied mammals on Cyprus. And so people probably learned very quickly that you rely heavily on the pygmy hippos and the dwarf elephants or you bring your own animals with you to stalk the island, so to speak. Interesting. So the project that we've started here and I've probably highlighted what some of the key questions are and spoke already as to what our interest in working in Cyprus is. And of course, we're particularly interested in learning more about these really early sites. So we have very few sites, we have some lithics, only one of these sites is dated, but we know that they're hunter-gatherers and we know they have strong connections with Southwest Asia. So we're really interested in finding more of these sites, being able to date these sites and being able to find in situ deposits that can tell us much more information about what it would have been like to arrive on the island. Did people live in only small kind of ephemeral campsites and move around the island doing a lot of exploring? Or did they stay close to the coast, establish these big kind of big base camps and then maybe make forays up some of the large river valleys to get a little bit of a better lay of the land, so to speak? You know, how far were people exploring when they first got there? Or did it take, you know, is there some lag time between what we find on the coast and what we find inland? I should also mention that there is another site that seems to have some very good stratification and we're still waiting for the site to be dated, but that may date as early as Akratiri at Acromnos, suggesting people didn't just kind of camp out on the coast and then leave and come back and kind of stay along those coastlines. But in fact, we're pretty intrepid at exploring inland, particularly up in the Trudeau Mountains area, which is the large mountain chain that runs through the central western portion of the island. Sorry, go ahead. Are they perhaps getting lithic resources in the interior? Yeah, so you can find a whole wide variety of lithic material on the coast, but most of it has gotten there by being eroded from the very lovely kind of prime in situ outcrops that are inland in the foothills of the Trudeau Mountains and then they erode down these large river valleys to the coast. So by the time they get to the coast, they're very heavily worn and they're very small. So, and we know that they were, we do have larger cores and larger blades that we find at some of these sites. So we know that they were probably traveling up these large river valleys as corridors to get to the foothills of the mountains to mine some of these nice geological outcrops. The question of course is how long it took them to figure that out and then how extensive settlement inland in these outcrop source areas were they, I mean, were they setting up shop there, so to speak and setting up settlements there or were they going as forays collecting material and bringing it back to the coast? And we don't have a good sense of that yet either. There's a lot of questions still to address not just with this project, but in terms of our larger understanding of what's going on in Cyprus, we do know they were doing really kind of cool and complicated things with the landscape from their first arrival. They were kind of manipulating what animals and plants were immediately available to them. Today, wheat is probably the most wheat and grapes are probably the two most popular crops on the island, but both of those come from the mainland in Southwest Asia where they are endemic and would have been brought to the island of Cyprus and they were brought very, very early. And so, from the earliest arrivals, we see people kind of practicing at least some form of landscape management and building the environment around them to be what they wanted. Yeah, sort of enhanced gathering. Yeah, yeah. And so that says really interesting things about two main concepts that I'm gonna end the talk with actually that have really shaped how we think about the research here and what's driving our questions about understanding these early hunter-gatherers. And then of course, to be able to manage this landscape, there's a whole bunch of interesting technological innovations and inventions that would have had to have come along with, of course, just getting to the island and then getting back again. So all these seafaring technologies, but also learning to work with new materials, new woods, new stone, where that material comes from, how you extracted and process it, some of those technologies were most certainly, of course, brought over with them, but probably had to be adapted to the materials and the different techniques that would have needed to have changed in this new context, this new environment. So we started this project actually in 2018, I believe, in earnest. And we just got back from a season last fall, so almost a year ago now, doing these two seasons of survey work, which actually expanded upon the work of Sally Stewart, my co-PI who I mentioned earlier, who had been surveying inland. So she'd actually been surveying up some of these major river valleys. And the last part of this work became surveying along the coastlines, which is where myself and other colleagues got involved. And so we spent two seasons, 2019 and 2018 before that, locating a bunch of these early potential sites along the coast. And our plan was to go back this fall and excavate one of these sites. We had all our ducks in a row to do that. However, now it seems that that probably won't be possible at least this fall. So we will go back as soon as we can and excavate a site that sits right above this rock shelter. So right along this area right here, which again has this nice large pocket of what we hope are in situ deposits that we can excavate and date. What we find at these coastal sites looks like this, which I get is not, doesn't jump out at you as saying, oh, these are definitely hunter-gatherers and they clearly have connections to other sites on the island and to the mainland. But what's particularly interesting is we seem to find the same types of cores, which is the stone that you are removing flakes and blades from to make tools. And of course the shape of that core tells you what types of things people removed off. So even if you don't have the tools themselves, you can get a good sense of what the stone tool technology was just by looking at the shape and the direction and types of removal on the cores. And so we see these particular types of cores, which were first identified at this pygmy hippo site, Akratiri. So we've called these Akratiri cores. There are hundreds of them at the site of Akratiri at a Kremnos. But what we have now since discovered is that we find them all along that south coast, wherever we find these other things, these little scrapers and bladelets. And so they seem to be a very close association between these very, very tiny. So you can see this is five centimeters across these very tiny bladelet cores. Again, using up the last little bits of good raw material that kind of make it down towards the coast, making these very tiny thumbnail scrapers and the small bladelets that we see that are typical of these early hunter-gatherer sites. And that show connections to sites in southwest Asia, on the mainland. And then so the last thing I wanted to say, and I'm happy to answer any questions, but the last thing I wanted to say is that this has really brought us to two key concepts that have been employed elsewhere in archeological literature in relation to hunter-gatherers and relation to seafaring cultures. And that's the ideas of transported landscapes and landscape learning. And both of these really revolve around thinking about the very particular dynamics between people and the physical landscape that they alter and change and create or transform as you move from one place to another, how you figure out what that landscape is and how you're going to engage with it. And then how people engage with each other in these spaces to create what are essentially these very kind of human landscapes. And so I think I'll leave it at that. And if people have questions, I am very happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Lisa. Well, we don't have a lot of time, but we do have a couple of questions here I could ask. One was about if there were other animals such as rats, mice, or cats that came along when humans introduced here. Yes, in fact, all of those things. Oh, really? Yes. So cats are domesticated, cats and dogs, both domesticated animals that were brought over to Cyprus, sheep, goat, cattle. So as you can imagine moving some of these animals as adults, especially on a probably relatively small watercraft would have been virtually impossible. And so it kind of speaks even more to the intentionality of these hunter-gatherers that they were probably, and later farmers, they were probably bringing these animals over when they were very young, which means they were bringing over breeding populations essentially. So probably males and females, when they were young, multiples of both, because you can't just have one of each and expect to establish a new breeding population on the island of Cyprus very easily or very quickly. So they were bringing over these young animals as young animals to then kind of invest in when they reach maturity, then breeding them. And of course, as we know from seafaring cultures around the world, including even very recent colonial seafaring voyages, there's what you intended to bring over and there's what you did not intend to bring over, but managed to come over anyways. And this includes things like rats and mice, perhaps even cats as well. That probably were hitchhikers along the way. And then made landfall when human groups did and kind of found their own niches in Cyprus. And of course then unintentionally altered the habitat of Cyprus itself, both changing the dynamics of preexisting animal groups and plants of course, but also bringing with them different types of diseases and pests and all of those things that we know happen when people and all of the things that accompany people, both intentional and unintentional arrive in new places. So yeah, we see those things in Cyprus as well. Yeah, interesting. All right, well, thank you, Lisa. It looks like we're been out of time, but thank you for coming on our program twice this summer. And so I wanted to conclude by thanking our viewers and remind people that they can provide comments in the link in our show description. And there's also a comment field in our video. So if you're willing, Lisa, later on, if there's questions after the fact, perhaps we can get to know that somebody's been asking questions on the video. So the discussion continues. There's always lots to say about what people do to manipulate landscapes and transform landscapes. That's right, yeah, and the boat technology and ropes and all these things are going to be fascinating parts of your work there. So, and then finally, yeah, we have email lists for people interested in events associated with the Archaeological Research Facility and the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and our websites have the links to those email subscription pages. So if you'd like to join our email list, you can get a lot of the same information on our Facebook pages as well. So thanks again, Lisa.