Mesopotamian fallow deer and the chase in later Neolithic Cyprus: insights from upper Mesopotamia, the Levant and badia

Abstract

This article compares and contrasts the role of hunting in Cypriot and mainland faunal economies of the 8th to 6th millennia cal. BC. It is well known that during this period Cyprus was characterised by the persistence of low-intensity adaptations based primarily on hunting of Mesopotamian fallow deer. Although this period witnessed a revitalisation of hunting in some mainland economies, especially in or on the margins of the greater Syrian desert, what might superficially appear to be an adaptive convergence between island and mainland was nothing of the sort. Strong arguments can be made that post-domestication revitalisations of hunting on the mainland stem either from intensification generally and the commodification of prey in particular, or from risk-buffering attempts to mitigate against perceptions of scarcity. On Cyprus, however, the paradigmatic predation of Mesopotamian fallow deer that endured into the mid Holocene appears to have been a relict of Pleistocene-style ‘controlled predation’, facilitated by low occupation intensity at island - if not always site - level and the likely survival of unhunted game reservoirs between catchments.