Pyla-Kokkinokremos

In an effort to catch up on some reading this past week, I spent some time with Joachim Bretschneider, Athanasia Kanta, Jan Driessen, Excavations at Pyla-Kokkinokremos: Report on the 2014-2019 Campaigns. Louvain 2023. This book documents five seasons of field work at the Late Bronze Age site of Kokkinokremos which is in the coastal region of Pyla village. It stands on a prominent, heart-shaped hill overlooking the Koutsopetria plain and immediately to the east of the site of Pyla-Vigla which occupies another prominent coastal height. Readers of this blog know that we conducted intensive survey of the region including the Kokkinokremos hill. Bretschneider, Kanta, and Driessen’s excavations at Kokkinokremos is the fourth campaign at the site which was initially excavated by Porphyrios Dikaios in 1934 and then over two seasons by Vassos Karageorghis and his colleagues in the 1980s and from 2010-2012. 

In 2008 and 2009, my little project excavated a series of trenches on the site as well, in a very minor series of excavations designed largely to ground truth a campaign of remote sensing on the site and to assess whether the site’s casemate style of architecture continued around the entire hill. Michael Brown, who directed this part of our project’s work published most of his results in his 2012 dissertation which is available here.

Bretschneider, Kanta, and Driessen’s book is intensely (and intensively) descriptive in a way reserved for archaeological reports. This is fine, but it doesn’t really entice the reader to dive deeply into the text, immerse oneself in a narrative, or reflect on the thousands of small decisions that go into an excavation. This isn’t so much a criticism of the book as a characterization of its approach to reporting on a site. It’s old school and very much in keeping with the kind of book that I’m working on these days describing our nearly contemporary excavations at Vigla and Kokkinokremos. These books have a place in archaeology, I think, but I also acknowledge that they’re a dying breed.

I won’t try to describe or assess the book here, but I’ll offer a few observations that are largely relevant to our work at Vigla.

1. Single Period. One of the most remarkable things about Kokkinokremos is that even after almost a dozen seasons of work at the site, there is no evidence for more than one main period of occupation. Bretschneider, Kanta, and Driessen acknowledge that our survey produced Roman and Late Roman material from the surface, but also claimed that their excavations produced very little similar material. 

More significantly, the excavations did not produce any compelling evidence for multiple phases at the site. In fact, excavations at Kokkinokremos did not appear to even produce evidence for adaptation, discard, or abandonment. This suggests a site that was active for a short period of time — maybe only 50 years — and did not experience a gradual abandonment or decline. 

This is interesting for a number of reasons largely to do with our understanding of the Late Bronze Age on Cyprus and the transition to the Iron Age. For our work, however, this is interesting because the adjacent site of Vigla shows a similar pattern of use during the Early Hellenistic period. While our excavations at Vigla revealed at least some evidence for clean up and adaptation of the site — which distinguishes it from Kokkinokremos — there is little evidence that this activity took place over an appreciable length of time. Fifty years of intensive occupation seems about right for Vigla.

After the period of intensive occupation… nothing. Later activity at both sites is limited to scatter of later ceramics perhaps identified with quarrying stones or agricultural activity at the sites. 

2. Function and Form. The form of Kokkinokremos is especially vexing. The main architectural feature of the site is the massive casemate style wall. The excavators note, however, that the casemate walls are not especially thick, suggesting that they were neither high nor especially formidable. In other words, these walls as well the position of the site on a high coastal plateau appear to be more of a deterrent than an actual fortification against an enemy incursion.

The significant number of pithoi and deep pits around the site suggest that the casemate walls likely served to protect a community who had invested in the storage of food and water. In fact, it is unlikely (and probably impossible) that the site had a natural water supply. This meant that storage of water was almost certainly a priority if one imagines the casemate walls as a form of fortification.

It is also striking that the site seems to have had very few buildings inside the casemate walls. While this awaits further investigation, one wonders whether this area was reserved for fertilized and irrigated gardens. 

3. Connectivity. One of the coolest things about the excavations at Kokkinokremos is that they’ve demonstrated that the residents of the site were connected to expansive networks of exchange. The excavators recovered ceramics from Crete, mainland Greece, Syria, Asia Minor, and — most spectacularly to my mind — Sardinia. While the authors of this report do not offer a definitive understanding of why such a diverse assemblage of material is present at Kokkinokremos, it is clear that its coastal location and the probable existence of an inlet, wetland, or embayment facilitated connections with maritime routes (and the parallels with the contemporary site at Hala Sultan Tekke). That said, the location of a site on the coast doesn’t necessarily produce the range of connections present at Kokkinokremos.

Again, it is interesting that the MUCH later Roman site of Koutsopetria showed a similarly wide range of economic connections across the Mediterranean. One wonders whether the situation of Kokkinokremos and Koutsopetria on the southern coast of Larnaka Bay situated near Hala Sultan Tekke/Kition and on the overland route to Enkomi/Salamis predisposed sites in the region to accumulate regional connections whether in the Bronze Age or in later Roman times.

Finally, and this just a side note, the site produced some absolutely amazing finds. We’re talking plaster spheres with folded gold objects inside, bronze figures of Astarte, and alabaster flask filled with precious objects. As the old saying goes: come for the rigorously documented archaeology, stay for the glorious color photos of cool stuff.