Khirokitia-Vouni

The world heritage site Khirokitia-Vouni is the most extensively excavated aceramic Neolithic settlement on cyprus. It was initially excavated by porphyrios dikaios between 1936 and 1946. Limited work was later carried out by Nicholas Stanley Price and Demos Christou, and since 1977 Alain Le Brun has continued excavations at the site. It is the type site for the Cypriot aceramic Neolithic period(early Neolithic or Khirokitia culture).

A very extensive area of the site has been cleared, revealing a closely packed array of circular houses of varied size. Most have very substantial stone foundations, with mud brick superstructure and flat roofs. In the larger examples, interior space may have been increased by platforms or mezzanine floors. A substantial stone “wall” running up the slope the full length of the excavated area has been variously interpreted, most recently as a formal boundary of the settlement marking off the safe interior from a hostile exterior. As the settlement grew, new houses were erected outside the wall, and a new wall, with a complex entry, was built. Intramural burials are a feature of the site. The economy of Khirokitia was based on an array of plants, many or which were imported to Cyprus at the beginning of the Neolithic period, and by a range of imported animals, primarily sheep, goat, pig, and deer.

David Frankel

References

Dikaios, P. 1953. Khirokitia. Oxford.

Le Brun, A. 1981. Fouilles recentes a Khirokitia (Chypre) 1977–1981. Paris.

———. 1989. Fouilles recentes a Khirokitia (Chypre) 1983–1986. Paris.

Kidd, Kenneth E.

(1906–1994)

Kenneth E. Kidd was the pioneer founder of Canadian historical archaeology. His initial training and fieldwork were in ethnology (his M.A. thesis at the University of Toronto was on Blackfoot ethnography) and prehistoric archaeology. In 1935, he joined the Department of Ethnology at the Royal Ontario Museum where he was assigned in 1941 to excavate one of the most famous sites in canada, the Jesuit Mission of Sainte-Marie (1639–1649) established in Huron Territory (Ontario). His two-year project at this site basically created Canadian historical archaeology and his book, The Excavation of Ste. Marie I, is very likely the first professional site report for any historic site in North America published as a separate book (Kidd 1941).

Unlike a number of his contemporaries in the United States, including j. c. harrington and john l. cotter, Kidd did not abandon prehistoric studies for Euro-American sites. His primary interest in the contact period kept him firmly committed to both types of archaeology. In 1948 he authored a significant report, “The Excavation of a Huron Ossuary,” and that article was followed by a popular synthesis, Canadians of Long Ago: The Story of the Canadian Indian, published in 1951 (Kidd 1948, 1951). His career-long focus on contact situations drew him into a lifelong study of European trade goods, especially glass beads, and in 1970, he and his wife, Martha Ann Kidd, summarized years of museum and archival research in “A Classification System for Glass Beads for the Use of Field Archaeologists” (Kidd and Kidd 1970). This system, although weakened by his choice of an impressionistic color-coding typology, was the first important guide to an artifact category found in historic sites on every continent.

In 1964, Kidd left the museum world to become the first holder of chair of the new Department of Anthropology at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, where he taught until his retirement in 1973. At Trent he made historical archaeology central to the curriculum and also established one of the first Indian-Eskimo studies programs in Canada.

Kidd was one of the few members of his pioneering generation who had a keen interest in the history of archaeology. He synthesized and surveyed Ontario archaeology in several articles across the decades and his article “Historical Site Archaeology in Canada” (Kidd 1969) is the only national history for that field in Canada.

In 1985, the Society for Historical Archaeology honored Kidd with its highest award, the j. c. harrington medal, and in 1993, he was presented with the Commonwealth Medal for the