Kephala: A Late Neolithic Settlement and Cemetery

This is the first volume in the final publication of the University of Cincinnati’s investigations on the island of Keos. It describes the excavation of a small site on the headland of Kephala, about one kilometer north of the Bronze Age site of Ayia Irini. Remains of both a settlement and its cemetery were uncovered, unusual in excavated Aegean sites earlier than the second millennium B.C. Although doubt is expressed about its exact date, the site definitely falls into the period between the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, when evidence of a hierarchical, more developed society emerges. Occupied for less than a century by a community of fewer than 100 people, the settlement was probably abandoned around the end of the fourth millennium B.C. perhaps because a worsening climate could no longer support early agriculture on the barren rocks around the site. The report concludes with specialist studies on the different classes of artifact found, including some of the earliest evidence for copper-working in the Aegean.