ABSTRACT
Research has demonstrated that the late seventh-to sixth-millennia BCE was a time of expansive ‘globalisation’ in many parts of the Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. During that period, communities of varying sizes and degrees of mobility utilised temporary camps, semi-permanent ‘stations’, and larger agricultural villages to bring the hitherto under-utilised dry-steppe and sub-desert margins of the Fertile Crescent into economic production. Far from being an unproductive waste, the great arc of this ‘desert line’ was characterised by an extraordinary array of productive seasonal microhabitats that were well placed to support a diverse range of socioeconomic activities. By the mid-sixth millennium – if not earlier – hunting, herding, and exchange networks linked the steppic rangelands, or badia, with the Tigris-Euphrates river system, which in turn gave access to regions extending from northern Syria to Mesopotamia and the Arabian Gulf. Through a detailed examination of developments in pastoralism both on the mainland and on Cyprus we argue that, far from being isolated from the expansive networks of the later seventh and sixth millennia, Cyprus may in fact have been their offshore western extension.
