Bamboula, Area A Circuit Wall (extracted from McFadden's notebooks)

AREA A CIRCUIT WALL

Important remains of a circuit wall were discovered on the NE slope of Bamboula. This starts with the low bluff at the eastern end of lot 270, and run across the lower part of the lot, but some distance up the hill from the sharp drop at its lower limit, coming nearer to the edge of the lot as it progressed north. The wall apparently continues beyond the northernmost point excavated, but there are no surface indications of it either crossing the old Limassol-Paphos road, or turning west around the knoll of Bamboula. Nor have we traced the wall SE of the easternmost excavated point. Here the bluff is quite high, so that a moderate sized wall on the top of the cliff would probably have been sufficient for defense.

The wall, as already mentioned does not lie at the edge of the field, and there is as yet no explanation for the great accumulation of earth at the edge (some three meters) and its sudden drop to the lower land to the NE. It would appear likely that there was a second fortification wall here, but no trace of this is visible in the bank, and our exploratory trench which came as close as possible to the irrigation ditch which runs along the edge of the lot, revealed no such traces. The deep deposit of earth which runs from the wall to the present edge of the field is of late Roman or still later date. It appears that the terrain in the Late Bronze Age ran almost level from the base of the wall into the fields which lie beyond lot 270 to the NE.

The excavations have revealed three sections of the wall, covering a total length of 93 meters, if we include two faces of the tower, and count the unexcavated sections as continuing in a straight line. The excavated remains fall into two main chronological groups, one of the Late Bronze Age, the other