 I'm very happy to be here and I'd just like to summarize some of our work at a very small site in Cyprus that has evidence for some exotic materials. In order to do this, I've got to give you in the short time we have some context, but until the past few decades, most people believe that the earliest substantial human occupation of any of the Mediterranean islands was relatively late. They're in the later Neolithic and even on islands like Cyprus, which had the earliest Neolithic, the aceramic Kira-Katea culture, that still was late by mainland standards starting about 7,000 calibrated BC. So Cyprus often has been regarded as little more really than a footnote to the Neolithic and that landscape has completely been rewritten in the past 20 years or so with compelling evidence for both pre-Neolithic and early Neolithic sites on, particularly on Cyprus, and the Neolithic is now as old as what you find on the mainland. So the bulk of this Neolithic package, okay, here are just some of the newer sites, late Epipaleolithic, possibly late Epipaleolithic sites and some early Neolithic sites, and I'd say the bulk of this Neolithic package had to be imported from the mainland, but this generally is viewed as being economic rather than a lot of exotic materials being imported. Most sites are coastal, but the site I want to talk about, and the one you're going to hear about next from Carol, are interior sites in the foothills. And the Cipro PPNB site of Iesioricus stands out for many reasons. First of all, it's 20 kilometers from the coast. It also contains huge, huge numbers of chipstone and faunal materials. Now I need to point out this was probably a seasonal hamlet. It was not a large village, so it's sort of in the Hinterlands, and yet we have the largest faunal and chipstone assemblages on the island, I think. We've got over 300,000 chipstone artifacts based on a 20% sampling strategy. So it's enormously rich, and numerous exotic artifacts also occur at Iesioricus, including imported obsidian, we just heard about, and carnelian. And there also are prized local materials, particularly picri-like, sort of a turquoise-like local material that occurs in Cyprus, often used in ornamentation. So even this remote upland site was involved in some sort of trade network involving materials imported beyond food. Now for context, there are at least two PPNA sites on the island that are documented now. There's more. One is the interior site you're going to hear about, and the other is a coastal village, very, very similar to what you see in Syria. The Cipro PPNB is better documented. There are five excavated sites. Again, most are coastal villages, and it's interesting. They're all distinct from one another, whereas Curicotin times sites are pretty monotonous. They look fairly similar. So this diversity stands in contrast to the Curicotin. Now, Iesioricus, as I noted, is unusual in many ways, beginning with its foothills location. And most of these sites, you do have small amounts of imported material, mainly obsidian from central Anatolia. At Iesioricus, which dates to approximately 7,500 calibrated BC, the chip stone shows some mainland similarities. Oops, come on here. Okay. Press escape, would help if I could read Spanish right here. Let me do the note there. Okay, your typical Neolithic package. Iesioricus in the foothills of the Trudeau, so it doesn't look like this in the summer. This is in the spring. PPNA sites, PPNB sites. Note the presence of cattle. I'll come back to that shortly. And then here is Iesioricus. So what we have at the site are in terms of clearly imported physical materials. The technology for the chip stone is imported, in terms of Naviform type cores and many other things that Carol and other people are working on. But we've got over 60 imported obsidian blade luts, well not all, but Rob Tycott sourced a large sample to central Anatolia. And two carnelian beads, which are imported as well. So we've got, even at this little site, off in the middle of nowhere, we've got imported materials. You can see reconstructed Naviform cores here and some of the obsidian. Notably, the largest blade that you see here was associated with our single burial. And then two pieces of carnelian. We have remarkable economic material, including cattle, which are not supposed to be on cypress until the Bronze Age. But now they occur at three sites and then they disappear by the curicotene. And well-dated economic materials. So this is eindhorn, oat, barley, pea, lentils. But at Isiocis, we are focused on the faunal assemblage. Deer is over 50% of what was hunted. And some recent dissertations have looked into this in detail and I don't have the time to go into that right now. We also have a salve-launch type vessel that was associated with some infant remains, not necessarily a proper burial. And this is a very rare type of, even on the mainland, type of artifact. So some pretty interesting stuff was going on here. And then the picrolite, which is not imported, but is often used in ornamentation, is pretty abundant. We also have some picrolite vessels at the site. Now in terms of structures, they are fairly unique. They're dominated by well-built oval platforms. You can see some here. We only have six of them. Erosion has taken a severe impact on them. But the largest one you can see, and some of the smaller ones. So these are pretty unique. And when you look at all the material culture, a lot of the criteria, I hate to jump on this bandwagon, but a lot of the criteria that Kathy Twist used for feasting does occur at ISU Orcas. That includes large numbers of large animals, the cattle, deer, other domesticates, special location, uplands, use of special serving paraphernalia. We have very elaborate groundstone at the site, perhaps representing the good dishes that you bring out for a special meal. Displays of wealth and commemorative items, perhaps the imported material, the obsidian, the picrolite, other unique artifacts. And public ritual performance, we don't really have that, although Paul Croft at one point suggested the platforms might have been dancing platforms, but I think he'd been out in the sun a little too long that particular day. But in any case, these expensive materials indicate that ISU Orcas was engaged in exchange networks and was far from an isolated village. So ISU Orcas was a lot more complicated than we originally believed. And while its function has not been completely determined, it's tempting to speculate that it might have served as some sort of summer resort or retreat, just like you see in Cyprus today when people go to escape the heat. Now, maybe you think I've been in Las Vegas too long and you see resorts everywhere, but it's an interesting idea. Now, from a broader perspective, how does ISU Orcas fit into the pattern of early colonization of Cyprus? And what do the exotic materials tell us about the site? Well, these colonists were not restricted to the coast. They ventured into the hinterlands and ISU Orcas was not an isolated entity. It appears to have been a full participant in the island's colonization and had access to imported exotic resources. Now, the big question is why people initially came to Cyprus? We still don't know. I am convinced they came from multiple sources, not just one place. And it may be the allure of an island just attracted a certain type of Neolithic nomad, traditional people who wanted to escape some of the tumultuous developments that were going on in the mainland. And once you start getting these large towns, you get crowd diseases, you get overexploitation. So maybe some smart people just decided we don't want to be part of that and came to the island, which had been known since Epipaleolithic times. And so Cyprus could have served sort of as a pastoral reprieve from mainland pressures. Now, of course, there are other more functional explanations such as mainland resource depletion, conflict avoidance. Maybe there are also some less tangible reasons, including the urge to explore. There might have even been a psychological reward for the island settlement. Carter and Crawford, in an interesting article, note that seafaring and long-distance trade is not only related to trade, but to the acquisition of knowledge, prestige, and power. And this is a stamp from the Philippines, apparently showing prestige and seafaring. So that much of this exchange was accomplished across water, as due to mention to the social complexity of Neolithic people. Now, oddly enough, though, exotic exchange appears to have essentially been a one-way street. Materials were imported into Cyprus, but thus far very few Cypriot materials have been found on mainland Neolithic sites. One intriguing possibility are the incised cobbles that you find in asoramic Neolithic Cyprus and very similar ones to Neolithic Shahrha Golan in Israel. And Joe just told me about some possible burial similarities in Morocco, of all places. That was a new one on me, so I'm looking forward to reading about that. But somewhat curiously, Cyprus gradually dropped out of the Levantine Interaction Sphere during the Kirikatea culture. And I think what the island tells us now is what it contributes to their current theory on island and unfamiliar landscape colonization processes that are looking at insularity and relationships with the mainland and interactions. And we're convinced now this is not a one-way Noah's Ark type of thing. People are going back and forth all the time. Now some scholars, just sort of the close up here, some scholars have distinguished two types of Mediterranean island societies. Monument and exchange oriented. For to Neolithic, the impressive temples in Malta may represent the former, but for Cyprus, blocking monumental features, the latter scenario is more likely. In other words, exchange oriented. So the first colonizers of Cyprus maintained many ties to their respective mainland, but gradually many of those disappeared. By the Kirikatea and Sotira Neolithic cultures, Cyprus shows very few remaining mainland linkages, including a lot of imported materials. By this time and for whatever reasons, communications with the mainland were severed or at least seriously compromised, and Cyprus was well on its way to forging its own unique island persona, one that persists today. So in conclusion, we know that the Neolithic was a time of experimentation. Some experienced work, some of them didn't. I love this cartoon showing the Neolithic here. Dogs are not going to lay eggs and chickens are not going to fetch, but the Neolithic people were experimenting and this included not only economic materials, but exotic materials. So I think these new studies require a sort of a dramatic reinterpretation of migration of peoples and ideas from their point of origin within a wider Mediterranean region. And this research also has implications for seafaring abilities. They had to be able to produce seacraft capable of carrying both people and animals across open sea, and it's now clear that there were numerous interactions with the mainland throughout the Neolithic. And as such, these were true pioneers and Cyprus with its strategic location was really a crossroads of several Neolithic cultures. But by the Kyrgyz, mainland contacts diminished and the islanders preferred to emphasize their own uniquely developing Cypriot identity. But that's a story for another time. Thank you.