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

AREA A CIRCUIT WALL -2-

of the Archaic period with subsequent remodellings running down into early imperial times. Most of the visible remains belong to the reconstruction of the Archaic period. This was carried out on a large scale, if in poor style. The Archaic masonry is very uneven and shaky. It consists of a more or less outer face of large unhewn blocks, and a broad fill of miscellaneous stones and some earth, thrown in behind it. Owing to the great breadth of this, it is improbable that the brick superstructure covered thex more than about half. The rest may have served as a paved road.

The remains of the Late Bronze Age are easily recognized by their much more regular masonry, and by the fact that they lie under the later wall. In most cases it was not deemed advisable to remove the later wall so as to study its predecessor in detail, but a section was cut through in the central part of Area A (in 2:E.1 of the field notations), and Virginia Grace has investigated a section at the extreme Eastern end of the excavated part since my departure from Cyprus. In these two sections we find that the Late Bronze Age wall was built of solid rubble masonry, and had regular faces on either side. It was somewhat less than a meter wide.

(Letters from Virginia Grace and Christos Grigoriou, my foreman, pasted into my notebook VIII describe the sounding in the East. These clearly show that the wall in this section is of at least L.C.IIIA date; I would want to see the sherds and perhaps enlarge the sounding before passing on the evidence for the date of the construction of the wall.)

In the section East of the towers, the Archaic wall was not superimposed upon the foundations of its predecessor, but its face was laid one to two meters further to the NE. The course of the early wall, which is relatively well preserved here, is shown in fig. IIa. The later wall, which is particularly uneven here, more or less parallels it.

Marginal pencil notes, left margin, not transcribed