Early Cypriot (Early Bronze Age I-III): 2300 - 2000/1950 BC

Eventually the Philia culture hybridised with local Chalcolithic traditions, creating the Early Cypriot culture. Flat bottomed Red-Polished Philia pottery gave way to a profusion of local, round bottomed variants produced in each settlement. The centre of pottery innovation in the early to middle Cypriot period was at first Vounous and then nearby Lapithos, both near the North coast. There, as the Early Bronze Age progressed, signs of further social differentiation appeared in grave goods, probably driven by the organisation of the expanding copper production and trade, but this did not produce distinctive elite dwellings. Southern pottery remained plainer and less innovative, and the culture may have been less hierarchical.

There were no towns yet. Buildings in settlements were close-packed and shared walls. Access was by narrow lanes. Houses were occasionally stone but more often mud-brick on a stone base, generally composed of a few rectangular rooms on one or two sides of a small courtyard. Walls and sometimes floors were rendered with lime plaster with low benches and hearths against the walls and pivot holes for doors. There were mortars sunk into the floor and lime plaster bins for storage jars and pots. Pierced lugs on many smaller bowls and vessels suggest they may have been hung from pegs in the wall. Stone grinders and scrapers were used in food production. Although there are a few ceramic depictions of thrones, and some tables and possibly stools, most people probably sat on the floor to eat. After the Philia period and until near the end of the Middle Bronze Age almost all vessels had round bottoms (like many traditional African pots now), so large storage vessels sat in dips in the floor while others probably sat in organic rings.

Staple foods comprised bread wheat, barley, chickpeas, and lentils, plus probably dairy products, while the major source of meat was sheep and goat, supplemented by venison, pork, and beef only for special occasions such as funeral feasts. This would have been extended with olives, berries, nuts and herbs, and seafood by the coast. Wine and beer were drunk. Wool, goat hair, and later flax fibres were spun and made into cloth. 

Although food production and some fabrication took place in houses and courtyards there were also mixed use workshops. The best example was discovered at Pyrgos Mavroraki near Limasol, where a complex of buildings contained copper smelting facilities, a perfume factory, an oil press with 500 litre storage jars, textile production and a winery.

Unlike the intramural burials of the Chalcolithic, extramural cemetaries were a considerable distance from the settlements, though usually within sight of them, which suggests some nervousness about the dead. Aside from some pit graves, burial was in rock-cut chamber tombs, which had a Dromos (a shallow pit outside, possibly used for rituals) leading through a narrow entrance (or entrances) into one or several chambers, generally cut into soft limestone, which were progressively re-opened and re-used and added to by a kin-group, sometimes for hundreds of years. Most of the complete objects we now have came from these tombs.

There seems to have been a fertility cult based around horned animals, principally the bull. The snake, representing the chthonic forces of death and rebirth was also represented, and late in the early Bronze Age images of birds proliferated in grave goods, possibly representing the spirit. Funerals may have been double: a cursory burial was later followed, after only bones remained, by a major celebration when the bones were transferred to a family tomb. This would suggest a possible cult of ancestor reverence. It is probably misleading to make a distinction between sacred and secular in such early cultures.

These elaborate funerals involved feasting and the consumption of alcoholic drinks and were occasions for the assertion and display of status by the provision of food and grave goods, including pottery, bronze and gold objects. The most common are the simple bowls used by the participants but beside the normal jugs and bowls, more elaborate and imaginative composite pots with proliferating spouts and bodies appeared, plus scenic models, most probably made especially for funerals, and representations on vessels of activities and cult animals. A little before 2000 BC the mysterious Plank Figures started to be made at Lapithos, which are found both in settlements and tombs and spread across most of the island.