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Archaeologists working north of Paphos have uncovered the remains of a substantial Bronze Age settlement at Kissonerga-Skalia, shedding light on a long-lived community active from roughly 2500 BC until its final abandonment around 1600 BC. The 2025 excavation season, directed by Dr. Lindy Crewe of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI), has clarified the site’s development and its role in early craft production on the island.
According to the Cyprus Department of Antiquities, the area preserves a continuous sequence from the Chalcolithic into the Bronze Age, following the earlier Neolithic–Philia occupation known from nearby Kissonerga-Mosphilia. Kissonerga-Skalia began as a Philia-phase village but expanded into a prosperous Middle Bronze Age community by about 1750 BC.
Near the end of the Middle Bronze Age, the inhabitants undertook a major construction effort. Older domestic buildings on the northern slope were dismantled, and their debris was pushed downslope to create an artificially level platform of at least 1,200 m². On this terrace, builders erected a complex system of massive walls, some more than a metre thick, defining roofed rooms and open courtyards connected by hardened mud or plaster floors. The architectural scale and organisation reflect wider changes occurring across the eastern Mediterranean at a time when maritime trade was strengthening and craft production was becoming more specialised.
Evidence suggests that this large complex was not used as a residential space. Instead, installations for heating, grinding and processing materials, along with storage vessels, point to craft-related activity. The settlement appears to have been deserted only a few generations after this construction phase, early in the Late Cypriot period.
Work in the 2025 season focused on areas connected to the use of the complex. Excavators had previously found a domed oven about 1.5 metres across within a plaster-floored courtyard. The courtyard is now known to form an L-shape, and at the short arm of the “L” the team has identified a second, much larger oven, one of the most striking discoveries so far.
This newly revealed installation measures roughly four metres in diameter and was built as a hard-fired, concave structure of mud plaster, apparently surrounded by low mud walls but left open to the sky. Material inside the oven contained discarded ground-stone tools, plaster pieces, pottery fragments and animal bones. The feature had already fallen out of use before the final abandonment of the site and had been sealed beneath a new floor, predating the construction of the smaller domed oven nearby.
Although the precise function of the large oven is still debated, soil samples processed by wet-sieving yielded charred remains of wheat and terebinth. These finds hint that foods combining these ingredients may have been prepared, or inadvertently burned, there, offering a rare glimpse into diet and culinary practice on Bronze Age Cyprus.
