Last Days on Cyprus

I’ve had a remarkably productive two weeks on Cyprus that are really the culmination of almost 10 years of work at Polis-Chrysochous and close to 15 years of work on the site of Pyla-Koutsopetria.

Our work at Polis has culminated in a massive article that we learned had been accepted just before departing for Cyprus. The article primarily focuses on the dating of the South Basilica and the material from a particularly robust deposit of material in a fill. In response to some of the reviewers critiques we expanded and refined our catalogue to connect our objects to our dates even more clearly. We also included more objects that push our building into the final third of the 7th century and perhaps even hint at the 8th. These are hazy times in the history and architecture of the island so our work will not only shed some light on a particular site and a late assemblage, but also on the history of the island and the region during a rather tumultuous and seemingly obscure period in the island’s history.

On the other side of the island, we wrapped up work on material from the sites of Pyla-Koutsopetria and Pyla-Vigla. The former is an Early Christian basilica probably dating to the late 6th-century and certainly in use in the early 7th century before probably collapsing sometime before the middle of that century. Vigla is a Late Classical to Hellenistic fortified site that produced a really nice assemblage of Hellenistic pottery from a clean up dump.

The two sites featured prominently in our survey volume (which is still available as a free download!) and for the last five years, we’ve been working on a detailed description and analysis of our material from three seasons of our own excavations and two reasons of excavations by the Department of Antiquities in the 1990s.

While Polis has plenty more material to draw us back, our work at PKAP is more or less over. So we’re looking to pass some of that site onto scholars interested in excavating the Hellenistic site on a larger scale than we did over our three seasons. It’s been kind of a bitter-sweet visiting Vigla the last time and putting away crates of objects knowing that next time we see these sherds it’ll be to put them into permanent storage.