Anthropomorphic figurines in prehistoric cyprus during the 4th and 3rd millennia bc: A diachronic and relational analysis in comparison with anatolia

Date

2026-5-7

Author

Bingöl, Berivan Helin

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Anthropomorphic figurines from prehistoric Cyprus provide important evidence for changing forms of social organization, material value, and interregional connection between 4000/3900 and 2200 BC. This thesis examines how figurine traditions on Cyprus changed through time and assesses, through comparison with Anatolian material, what these changes reveal about broader patterns of similarity, divergence, and interaction in the eastern Mediterranean. The analysis is based on a primary Cypriot dataset of 626 anthropomorphic figurines from 19 sites and a comparative Anatolian corpus of 730 figurines from 50 sites. Rather than treating figurines as isolated typological forms, the study approaches them as relational artifacts whose significance emerged through shifting alignments among raw material, bodily form, depositional context, and use-history. The results suggest that Cyprus and Anatolia did not share a single continuous figurine tradition. In the earlier horizon, both regions still overlapped in a limited clay-based and broadly schematic anthropomorphic repertoire, but the Cypriot corpus was already beginning to differentiate internally through more selective combinations of material, bodily form, and depositional setting. By the Middle Chalcolithic, this process reached its fullest development on Cyprus, where figurines became more strongly tied to picrolite, to socially differentiated depositional contexts, and to the organization of value and identity. Anatolia, although following a different material trajectory, likewise shows increasingly differentiated anthropomorphic traditions structured through distinct local material and contextual regimes. In the later horizons, however, the two regions diverged more sharply. While Cyprus entered a phase of contraction and selective survival, Anatolia sustained a broader and more materially varied figurine field. Figurines therefore illuminate changing and asymmetrical forms of regional entanglement rather than a single shared tradition or a straightforward model of imitation.

Subject Keywords

Prehistoric Cyprus, Anthropomorphic figurines, Cyprus–Anatolia comparison, Diachronic analysis

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119119

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis