Charalambos Paraskeva CAARI Lecture

It Takes Two to Tango: The Philia-Drakos Chalcolithic Settlement at the Dawn of the Bronze Age
In the year 1941, the Curator of the Cyprus Museum Porphyrios Dikaios conducted a brief trial excavation at the site of Philia-Drakos Site A, where he believed to have uncovered a site dating to the Erimi Stage. Two years later, he returned to the general area of Drakos and sank another trench at Site B, uncovering a site that he dated to the Ambelikou Stage with links to the Early Cypriote I culture. A decade later, Hector Catling surveyed the locality Philia-Vasiliko in the vicinity of Drakos and identified the presence there of an Early Bronze Age settlement with Philia stage sherds. In 1964, Trevor Watkins inspected the area dubbed Site C at Drakos and traced the presence of a second Late Chalcolithic settlement through which were cut Early Cypriot tombs. A year later he commenced scientific excavations at Philia-Drakos Site A, which was firmly re-dated to the Ceramic Neolithic. In 1980, Einar Gjerstad after re-examining part of the material from Site B, identified Philia stage sherds, a proposal later dismissed by Edgar Peltenburg. In the same decade, Diane Bolger suggested that Sites B and C were contemporary Late Erimi sites, while Steven Held mapped both as Erimi Culture sites. At the turn of the last century, Jennifer Webb and David Frankel, though recognizing that Site B was principally occupied in the Late Chalcolithic, catalogued it as a Philia facies settlement along with Philia-Vasiliko, as a separate entry. Since then, both sites have entered the archaeological literature as examples of a culturally distinct and homogeneous system of Philia settlements that emerged at the dawn of the Bronze Age. Given that the cultural material from Philia-Drakos Sites B-C and Philia-Vasiliko are poorly published or unpublished, the complex archaeological history of the area coupled with its inaccessibility to archaeological research since 1974, has permitted the appearance of conflicting interpretations on their dating and function, while at the same time excluded these sites from discussions regarding the indigenous responses to the significant socio-cultural changes observed on the island at the beginning of the Bronze Age. This lecture aims to redress the imbalance by presenting a re-examination of the surviving cultural material from these sites with a view to on the one hand disentangle their dating and function, and on the other hand embed them in a more nuanced understanding of how Cyprus transitioned to the Bronze Age utilising an alternative set of theoretical instruments inspired by the concept of conviviality.