Cliffs at Cape Pyla. southern Cyprus, wfiicti yielded pygmy 

 hippopotamus bones from five caves. 



The pygmy hippopotamus bones at Ayios Yeorylos. Cyprus. 



26 



local villagers collected these bones, powdered them, 

 and mixed them with water, believing the concoction 

 to be a cure for nearly every disease known to man. In 

 1972 scholars decided to separate the dwarfed Cypriot 

 hippopotamus from the genus Hippopotamus:, appropri- 

 ately, Phanourios was chosen as the new generic name. 



Not all Cypriot fossil mammal remains are 

 thought to be saints or martyrs. Near the village of Ayia 

 Irini, in Cape Kormikiti in northwestern Cyprus, there 

 is an extensive site called Dragontouvounari (Greek for 

 "Hill of the Dragons"). This fossil mammal deposit was 

 interpreted by the residents as being the burial place of 

 dragons killed in a catastrophic flood. 



Elsewhere on the island similar deposits of bones 

 are virtually ignored. At a mandra, or sheep's fold, 

 north of Ayia Irini, hippopotamus bones are found 

 under a thin layer of dried goat dung, ignored by all 

 except enterprising explorers. 



Since the late 1970s my research has taken me 

 away from pygmy mammals. I have mainly analyzed 

 marine shells and animal bones from archaeological 

 sites in the Mediterranean Basin and Near East. During 

 the summer of 1988, however, I returned to Cyprus to 

 continue research on the dwarfed mammals of the is- 

 land, this time from a new site which also produced 

 evidence tor human interaction. 



Excavations on Eagle's Cliff 



In 1961, a 14-year-old English boy named David J. 

 Nixon, spending six months with family or friends who 

 were stationed at the Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri 

 in southern Cyprus, came across an eroded rock-shelter 

 on a precipitous cliff about 200 feet above the Med- 

 iterranean Sea. Here he found fossilized bones, some of 

 them burnt, as well as marine shells and fragments of 

 chipped stone tools. 



Nixon took some of this material back to England, 

 and in 1966 he showed them to an authority on fossils 

 and prehistoric archaeology, the late Dr. Kenneth P. 

 Oakley, of the British Museum (Natural History). 

 Oakley identified the bones as belonging to the pygmy 

 hippopotamus, the shells as the edible snail Morwdon- 

 ta, and the chipped stones as being possibly Neolithic. 



In 1971, after reading a book on the archaeology 

 of Cyprus by Dr. Vassos Karageorghis, director of the 

 Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, Nixon wrote to 

 Karageorghis about this site. The Nixon letter, maps, 

 and photographs were received by the Cyprus Museum, 

 but were never followed up by archaeologists on the 

 island. 



