The agricultural system of a crisis years settlement: archaeobotanical evidence from Late Bronze Age Pyla-Kokkinokremos, Cyprus
Carly Henkel, Joachim Bretschneider, Jan Driessen, Athanasia Kanta & Evi Margaritis Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 75, 2026: 106069
To date, archaeobotanical records for Late Bronze Age Cyprus provide little insight into agricultural activity of the time, such as specific farming systems and cultivation practices. This paper presents the results of an archaeobotanical study for the site of Pyla-Kokkinokremos (LC IIC, c. 1230–1170 BCE): a short-lived settlement that existed towards the end of the Late Bronze Age during a time often referred to as the crisis years on account of increasing mobility of people, violence and aridity throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. The Pyla plant assemblage included a significant concentration of charred plant material encountered at the bottom of a shaft. This plant material comprised a mixture of cereal crop processing products (grain) and by-products (chaff, straw and weed seeds). Its analysis sheds light on the settlement’s agricultural production, consumption and storage practices. The archaeobotanical evidence suggests that the Pyla community engaged in a well-developped agro-pastoral farming system, in which cereal crop processing by-products were stored for their potential use as fodder. The flowering times and growing heights of the weed seeds included in the assemblage also indicate the harvesting of cereal crops in the spring by reaping low on their culms. Despite this evidence for extensive farming activity by the Pyla community, the use of the shaft for agricultural storage purposes later ceased, which perhaps hints at declining agricultural productivity in the area – a factor that may have contributed to the abandonment of the settlement.