What I Did This Summer: Polis on Cyprus Edition

The early fall is always an awkward time of year because it marks the intersection of summertime work and the more regular routine of the semester’s start (as well as baseball and football season).

Over the last couple of week’s I’ve been working to pull together some of our work from the past summer on Cyprus. This primarily focused at the site of Polis and, more specifically, on the area of E.F1 in the Princeton Cyprus Expedition grid. I’ve written a decent amount about the small excavations in the area, but, so far, we haven’t really produced much more than a synthetic studies of the work there. Our current plan is to produce a more comprehensive study as part of the first volume of a new series dedicated to the Princeton work at Polis.

As per usual, I suspect that it’ll take years for the final publication of this site to appear, but for now, we can provide a provisional (and perhaps ante-penultimate) draft publication of the area. As you’ll discover, if you click the link below, the catalogue is not entirely complete and lacks illustrations at present (but I’ll work to update this when they’re available), but we have completed most of the interpretative heavy lifting and we have largely connected the dots at the site. 

For those of you who don’t know Polis, much less E.F1, the excavations in the area revealed at least four phases of Late Roman activity at the site of which three left clear architectural traces and one was manifest in a burial. More importantly, perhaps, is the assemblage of Late Roman ceramics from the site and residual material dating primarily to the Roman period. The Late Roman fine ware is perhaps the most useful assemblage for scholars, although the site also produced a diverse array of Late Roman amphora and cooking pots. There’s a nice gaggle of lamps and lamp fragments from the site as well which should provide a window into lamp circulation in the western part of Cyprus (and will likely be more meaningful when we publish the illustrations).

Some of the point of publishing this is to run up a flag to show folks what we’ve been doing. It goes without saying that if you have interest or questions about work, please do reach out!

Here’s a link for the download!