 Well, good afternoon. As the title suggests, I'm looking at colorful networks, pigments as a commodity. Ayava Varas Procremnos is a late PPNB site in Cyprus, one of the two, as Alan mentioned, but it's a completely and utterly unique kind of site. It is not a village. It is a task-oriented site. And I'm going to run through some of the reasons why, I think so, and based on the evidences that we have found. And it's actually, to my mind, does prevent, present evidence of that kind of trading situation that Alan suggested might actually be missing from Cyprus. So what do you do? Oh, arrows, maybe. Oh, there we go. There we go. Okay. I'll add that Alan, Andrew, share it volume, trade in the beginning of agriculture. I happen to be one of those who's a little bored with domestication. The Neolithic was also a lot about objects, materials, the exotica. And given Ayava Varas, the things that I've been producing from Ayava Varas, that's where I like to focus. I'm splitting this into basically the tangible objects. We know about the obsidian. We've just been hearing about some of the central materials. I've also been very interested to hear about chert being traded in the central areas of the Mediterranean as well. Here's an example from Ibanez et al, showing the PPNB obsidian networks. And basically, Cyprus is still left off. Okay. If we look at a more recent one from Carter et al, at least, we see Cyprus being kind of actively involved in terms of amounts of obsidian. But it's a crawl to get to the idea that people are interacting. Even though we're allowing the animals to be going back and forth or coming in repeatedly, we still aren't letting anyone go off the island. This is a unique one. I was interested to hear earlier that the obsidian is really linked in the central Mediterranean to the Neolithic. This is actually an upper Paleolithic example of an early exchange in Israel. Okay. Chert. I was very interested, as I said, to hear about the chert in the middle of the Mediterranean. I have often suggested that chert might have been one of those commodities very much valued from Cyprus, particularly those ones over here in the lower right. Extremely high quality, what you would call Flint. Our geologists call it chert, so I stick with that. This is only some of the color variety we have on the island. What we have here is at the boundary of the purple, which is the pillow lavas, and the green, which is the left chert bearing zone. In our funny little shaped survey area, we have recorded some 45 chert sources. As you can see with my nice little star there, the site of Ayavavara is plunked right in the middle of two big concentrations. One of the main things they were looking at there before we get to the pigments was also clearly chert. Sally Stewart, who has done a little bit of NAA analysis, has begun to try to interpret these cherts coming into the site from the various chert sources and napkin sites and other occupation-type sites and to understand how people might have been using the landscape. Also these blue squares, they're actually actively using, we call them blobs, pillow lava, big pieces of pillow lava to help them orient themselves around the landscape. And you can actually link up a whole set of sites where you can see one to the next to the next, which is really quite interesting. Okay, arrowheads. Now this is why I actually believe in chert moving off the island. There you have a nice little set of arrowheads from and they have a picture published here. Most of the Levantine material is grey, it's brown and varieties thereof, with the exception of the nice purple pink material. These red examples are clearly distinct and they are mirroring very closely with the materials we've got from Ayavavara. So that whole set of arrowheads is coming from Ayavavara. Alan has already mentioned the picolite, which is the little funny drilled thing over in the side there. They were making ornaments with it. I also think we should be looking at this as a commodity. It's never been tested. Clearly, thanks to Daniela Barjosev et al, we have an acknowledgement that green objects were becoming quite important with the neolithic. I have seen things called steatite from mainland reports that really look like picolite. And since picolite was often called steatite originally, I think we should actually check that one. Okay, as Alan had noted, here is the inclusion of Cyprus right at the beginning of the PPNB period. This is not showing the actual PPNA, which is the most recent materials. What I wanted to pull out with this is the somewhat less tangible things. Stone is easy. In a sense, you can actually source it, get chemical signatures. Then you get into the less tangible in the sense that the objects are dead, the trees and the plants and the animals, but you can still at least do genetic analysis and so on and so forth. The obsidian at the bottom is considered to be the only other import to the island in the neolithic, aside from the Cornelian that Alan has pointed to. And then basically we're talking in this middle group here of ideas that have come across rather than actual commodities. But if we look at the landscape of Cyprus, here we are right in the little area near Ayavavara, with the pillow lavas shown again in the purple and the green with left car formations. Up in the upper left there, you see we have stratified above the pillow lavas the umbers and they're massive. And then stratified with the Cyprus sulfides, you have the ochres. And what's so interesting about this is the huge amount and variety. All right, though they were not using copper at this stage, they certainly knew where the copper sulfides were. Here's some work by my colleague Cassianidu, where she's showing here, this is our lower left, is our survey site with the purple and the green again, just above is a metallurgical one showing with the two yellow dots the um smelting deposits from Matiari south and north. Now Ayavavara is literally about a kilometer from that red dot, which is the the north version. And as you can see over here on the other map that is looking at the metallurgy, everywhere you've got those little cross things, you've got your sulfides. And so they've put themselves exactly in the right place to collect this material. They were not looking to be farmers, they were looking from materials. This is what they look like. Obviously these are modern pits, but we for example in the upper left were chasing a church seam and came across this middle picture where you could see the back end of the Matiari north slag heaps. And it's quite obvious that these boulders are popping out all over the place, plus we found little streams that were yellow and you know the materials visible in the landscape. They would have had an easy time finding it. Over in the lower right you can see the amazing amount of color that we've got. You don't have to cook it, it's there, it's natural. And then my two colleagues walking down into the Matiari south. It is massive and an amazing hypermarket of color. This is Ayavavara just very quickly to show you that you know what's going on at the site. This isn't a village, it's a non-continuous occupation. The earliest structure in the lower right probably going to about 9,000. We haven't dated it yet completely, but it's sealed by a level at 8,900. The little object on the side there is the earliest figurine in Cyprus. It did actually have a tiny fragment of painting on the back of it. One of two objects we had from the site at all with any painting on them. But the important part of it is that it was part of an abandonment phase of that structure. It's then sealed by a bunch of rubbish dumps and we get the middle phase where we have a series of dates at 8,700 and 8,500 from stratified lithic chert layers. And then we have our figurine that we charmingly call Bab. She's huge. She's about 30 centimeters for Ayavavara obviously. And we have clearly a degrading of the construction. Then it's not as elaborate. It's a flat hole in the ground with a bunch of pits that have nothing in them but a bunch of grinding tools, many of which have ochre on them. Ochre in before I leave actually this earlier structure up in the right up there. You can see that corn was my great hope for the cereals. Turned it over. It's covered in red ochre. So there you go. We haven't found any plants yet. The latest structure is of stratified above an alluvium of peripete material which does contain yellow ochre in it. And it was a ball-shaped pit in the ground. And it is contemporary with a set of working areas for picrolite which I'm going to describe for you now. This little funny clay object, the earliest on Cyprus, was it sort of token abandonment thing. And then this little pendant was turned upside down clearly as an abandonment gift to a small structure just to the west. And then our radiocarbon dates. All right. So working pigments. Okay. In terms of church, I know Alan said he's got the largest assemblage but I've got 3,000 kilos. So I'm quite sure we might have a little bit more. The other thing we have is 20 kilos of pigments. Now that's what you can pick up. If it gets wet, it melds into the ground. And so this is a small sample basically is what I'm trying to say. Here's some of the variety of the color. What we had stratified immediately above that earlier, the middle structure, was this set of weird white rocks, chalk rocks, which we had no idea what they were. I've never seen a site like this anywhere in the Neolithic so far. Kind of circled around a hearth type dead burnt rocks. Turned it over and well and behold, there were ochre staining on it and beautiful cut marks basically. So they were clearly preparing something which then needed to be perhaps stripped dried in these little sterile pits that usually had little post holes here. This one we just haven't excavated yet. So I'm guessing we might be talking about the tanning of pigskin. That's the only animal we've got at this stage on the island. An example of one of the ochre stained grinders. We've got very excited about these in the beginning, but we've got over 300 of them out so they're kind of boring. The structure which starts as the pit, oh wait I should go back to this one. Just beyond this area you had a funny little hollow. This is a stage two in the working. Stored objects, an upturned corn and stacked with little grinders beside it and two beautiful big scrapers. And then down through several layers of little carpets of piccolite. I mean, I mean, sorry pigments. Every one of these X's is a planned pigment nodule we collected. At the very bottom of this thing we found like little divots with sets of blades, maybe a scraper and then evidence of burnt pillow lava rock. Third stage is over here in the structure, that last bowl structure. By the time they're using it at this level, it had made itself a nice little bench. This is actually primary material left in situ. You can sit there. Well, if you're smaller like me, you can sit there. You have your anvils to one side, your grinders to the other side and a little set of beautiful grinders right in front, this little bunch down here. And then this weird pile of mud, which was completely speckled with different colors of pigments. So the idea being here is that Cyprus did have a commodity that was useful and wanted, but it is an intangible. How do we pick it up on the mainland? This set of constructions is very similar to, these are two examples up in the top left and then over here. This is a Natufian set of grinders with ocher staining and then up here some from Italy. I can't find anything in the Levant that equates to the working areas we've got in Ayavavara. If you know of any, please let me know. The closest I've found are these particularly Repiro di Ammetri, or however you say that, Italian ones. And then interestingly found a report on the useware analysis of flints from Marebet, where Ibanez et al. again describe the use of scrapers, blade scrapers, and simple blades with just a polish on them for working of hides. Now the most interesting part about this is that he suggests this continued through the PPNA, but with the beginning of the PPNB, they started using a different tanning element. So that could easily explain why we have Ayavavara plunked at the end of the PPNA, valuable commodity being used for tanning, and then it's gone from the record at least in terms of tanning. Then leaves off with what did anybody do with pigment after that, and quite a lot. You can use it as a halftime stick, huge amounts of decoration and objects and wall murals and statuettes coming in in our own tentaman down here, which is down to the late PPNB. Clearly ochre use continued that Ayavavara shows us a very intangible possibility where it was a really specialized use for tanning, but those sulfides were there and it's kind of interesting that we don't seem to have that exploitation going on after that. So that's an interesting idea to think about. I do think people were coming to the island for things other than just the land, and one of these things could have been the pigments.