1981–1983

George McFadden of the University of Pennsylvania excavated at the Sanctuary from 1935 to 1941 and 1945 to 1953 in which year all work ceased owing to McFadden's death. McFadden published brief accounts of his work in the Bulletin of the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and he also kept day to day notes in manuscript form which fill 17 small notebooks; these however, contained no conclusion about the date or function of the many buildings he excavated. After McFadden's death, Robert Scranton of the University of Chicago studied the exposed remains and published his observations in a monograph - The Architecture of the Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 57, 1967. Joseph Last, who had worked as McFadden's architect wrote about the water system - "Kourion: The Ancient Water Supply." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 119, 1975. Because McFadden had only exposed buildings, and had neither excavated foundation trenches nor analyzed most of his finds, no real evidence exists for the dates of the buildings, other than his observation. McFadden, however, had kept brief but informative field journals making it possible for us to reconstruct what he did and proceed from his work.

In 1978 the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore and the University of Missouri, Columbia jointly initiated an excavation at the Sanctuary. Two goals were sought: (a) to establish the chronology for Roman use of the site, particularly the Temple of Apollo (the responsibility of the Missouri component of the project); (b) to establish the extent, chronology, and function of the Archaic Precinct (the responsibility of the Walters component). From 1979-1981 the joint project was funded in part by a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (RO-00093-74-861).

The excavation and study seasons in the Archaic Precinct conducted in 1982 and 1983 were sponsored by the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and again funded by matching grants from the NEH (Ro-20367 and RO-20536).