The Aceramic Neolithic in Cyprus: a frame counted in millennia

The frame

The chronological table of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus frames the Aceramic Neolithic as the 10th to the 6th millennium BCE, for the whole island. The site adopts this table as its frame for Cyprus because it is the division published by the island's own Department of Antiquities, rather than applying the Levant's periods to the island. The Department of Antiquities pages cited here could not be opened for checking on 24 October 2026; the details from them follow notes taken from those pages at an earlier stage and were not re-checked. On the timeline the period is drawn from 10,000 to 5000 BCE; that is an approximation for navigation, not a date from the source. Source 1.

Boundaries and overlaps

The table overlaps itself: the end of the 6th millennium, where the period ends, is later than 5500 BCE, the year in which the same table begins the Ceramic Neolithic. The Department's Greek page on Kalavasos-Tenta dates that site to 7000-5200 BCE, that is, into the years of the overlap. The Met's timeline, read on 24 October 2026, does not distinguish an aceramic from a ceramic phase at all, and gives Cyprus a single "Neolithic period", about 8500-3900 BCE, whose start is later than the table's 10th millennium. The page shows these versions side by side and does not decide between them. Sources 1, 2, 3.

On this site

Three articles are placed in this period. "Khirokitia: a walled village" presents the round houses, the walls and the burial beneath floors according to UNESCO, and the dates on which the sources disagree. "Kalavasos-Tenta: not only Khirokitia" adds a second site dated 7000-5200 BCE and asks what a comparison of the two allows one to say. "Kissonerga-Mylouthkia: wells of the Aceramic Neolithic" deals with wells that the Department of Antiquities dates to the 9th millennium BCE, in the early part of the period. There is no museum object of this period on the site yet. Sources 2, 4.