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10 décembre 1969
Communiqué pour la presse de Chypre (prière de m'envoyer les coupures des journaux.)
The 20th. Season of Exploration at Enkomi-Alasia by the French Archaeological Expedition (Nov.-Dec. 1969)
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In November and beginning December, the French Archaeological Expedition, under the direction of Prof. C.F.A. Schaeffer, undertook further research in the Bronze Age capital city of Cyprus located in the vast fields north-east of the present village of Enkomi, some two miles inland from Salamis, which became in its turn the capital of the island during the Greek period(1).
In the three areas of the north-west part of the city, where new excavation was undertaken, the ground had been extensively investigated by villagers during the 19th. century, as well as by two former expeditions at the beginning of this century, in search of the Bronze Age tombs and their sometimes rich funeral offerings. The overlying architectural remains of houses considered until then as belonging to a Byzantine or even later city had been broken through and badly damaged. Sometimes less than one meter of intact levels remained between the numerous soundings, where the walls of the Bronze Age city - to which belonged the underlying family tombs - could be securely traced and their plan recovered. Practically no finds, except broken pottery and millstones, were made there. But the succession of the three superimposed town levels was once more established.
Under the surface and down to one and a half meter, there was a succession of four floor levels belonging to houses of the earliest known Iron Age period (between 1200 and 1100 B.C.), some of which were buried under thick accumulations of debris from structures collapsed during heavy earthquakes.
During the earliest of these Iron Age settlements of Alasia (Level IV) the remaining ruins of the late Bronze Age city (end of the 13th c. B.C.) with its remarkable earlier architecture were used again, after its spacious houses had been divided into smaller dwellings and workshops, some of which were used by bronze and iron smiths.
The underlying fifth level revealed again unmistakable signs that the late Mycenaean city had been destroyed not by an invasion - as it had been so far admitted - but by an earthquake, during a period of acute water shortage, which finally led to a temporary abandonment of the city by its inhabitants, except for some isolated dwellers.
In a southern quarter of the city, near the so-called House of the Bronzes, where the French Expedition had discovered now 35 years ago the first remains of the town of Alasia, the research last November revealed the existence of another of those extensive late Bronze Age houses with thicker walls built
Handwritten: illegible marks
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