Includes summary in English language (p. 23).

Includes bibliographical references (p. 32-34).

There is a danger that we assume - as many did before - that the earliest sites that w know represent the colonization of the island. The purpose of the paper is to consider the question of the colonization of Cyprus but in a broader context than that of the recent archaeological discoveries on the island. Occurring the final Pleistocene (if we include the Akrotiri site in the story) or the early Holocene, the colonization of Cyprus represents an early example of the expansion of modern humans to colonize the last remaining unpopulated lands, the previously uninhabited islands. The worldwide evidence is that this colonization was carried out by complex, sedentary of semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers as well as by simple farmers. Especially within southwest Asia, and particularly within the Levantine corridor, hunter-gatherers of the epi-palaeolithic period adopted new subsistence and settlement strategies. These hunter-gatherers are in principle candidates to be the first colonists of Cyprus as much as early farmers. Their strategy involved reliance on broad-spectrum hunting and harvests of seeds that imply storage, and the stored food supplies imply reduced mobility to the point of sedentary, year-round occupation of village sites. On the one hand, this new mode of hunter-gatherer life implies a different kind of relationship between human groups and the environment within which they acquired their subsistence. On the other hand, it also involves profound changes in the social group, both in its size, social organization, and in the cognitive and psychological consequences for the individual. These societies were scarcely different in almost every way from the early farming societies. A hypothetical reconstruction is suggested in which the island was first colonized by complex hunter-gatherer groups at the end of the Pleistocene, who then maintained their network of exchanges and links with their mainland cousins until these were progressively eroded of abandoned in the seventh and sixth millennia B.C.