TWO ANCIENT campsites on the coast of Cyprus, found this year by archaeologists, may be the earliest evidence of long-distance, open-water seafaring in the Mediterranean, undermining beliefs that ancient mariners never ventured into open seas.
According to yesterday’s New York Times, a preliminary analysis of the findings, including an abundance of crude stone tools, suggests that people in small boats from what is present-day Syria and Turkey paid seasonal visits to the island of Cyprus possibly as early as 12,000 years ago.
These were daring voyages of at least 50 miles each way, often twice as far, at a time when Cyprus had no permanent inhabitants and sailors who ventured out to sea usually made a point of staying within sight of land. The lure of better fishing waters may have drawn the seafarers to the island, where they fished offshore by day and made camp on the high ground above beaches now favoured by tourists.
Flints, unlike anything found in the geological make-up of Cyprus, and more than 1,000 years older than the timing of the first permanent settlers to the island, were found at the sites.
“If this is verified this would be the earliest evidence of seafaring in the East Mediterranean,” said Pavlos Flourentzos, director of Cyprus’ department of antiquities.
Fragments were found at sites on the southeast and west of the island by Albert J. Ammerman, an archaeologist at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York.
The site on the southeast is a hilly outcrop overlooking Nissi Beach, one of the most popular beaches on the island. “Its a rock where they now do bungee jumping,” Flourentzos
told Reuters. The other site is at Aspros, in the Paphos region.
The disclosures were contained in an archaeological paper Ammerman recently released at a conference in Philadelphia in the United States.
“They have yielded good evidence for the earliest voyaging in the Mediterranean and for the increased mobility of people at the end of the ice age and the beginning of agriculture,”
Ammerman was quoted as saying in the US daily.
The archaeologist was assisted by Carole McCartney, a research fellow with the University of Cyprus, who has studied the flints and stone tools. Speaking to the Cyprus Mail yesterday McCartney said these discoveries could mean that Cyprus was the first island colonised in the Mediterranean.
“We’re currently in a new chapter of understanding the colonisation of the island and these discoveries are sure to help us.”
Ammerman said the geology and the types of tools led his team to estimate that the seafarers from the mainland were camping in Cyprus sometime around 9,000 to 10,000BC. They stayed for a few nights each season, at most a few weeks, and returned to the mainland. The archaeologists inferred the seasonal nature of the visits because the sites were on the coasts, with no sign of a human presence inland.
“These were not colonisers,” Ammerman said of these camping seafarers. “There was no island society as such, no native people yet, and these visitors had a very limited existence.”
Cyprus’ earliest inhabitants dated from the 9th millennium BC are believed to be from the land mass which now rings it to the north and east.
