Least Cost Pathway Analysis of obsidian circulation in Early Holocene–Early Middle Holocene Cyprus

Abstract

Obsidian, a naturally occurring glass and rare resource, appears in the archaeological record of Cyprus at the same time when human populations establish permanent settlements across the island. Geological sources of obsidian do not occur on Cyprus so the material had to be procured elsewhere and then introduced to the eastern Mediterranean island. Recent geochemical analyses (pXRF) on obsidian assemblages dating to the Early Holocene (8900–5200 Cal BCE) demonstrate that the material derives from multiple exogenous geological sources. Here we use a geospatial computational approach, namely Least Cost Paths Analysis, to address the circulation of obsidian once it arrived on the island. By doing so, we aim to: (a) determine the potential routes/optimal paths via which the material circulated across the island, (b) understand how these early communities used their landscape to build their social networks and exchange their goods, and (c) compare how these paths may have differed from the earlier exploitation locales of the first visitors to reach Cyprus in the Terminal Pleistocene.