Akamas: the Danish Akamas Project at Ayios Kononas

On the Akamas peninsula the Danish Akamas Project excavated a Late Roman house on a plateau overlooking the sea, a three-aisled basilica and five Byzantine houses, and surveyed about 15 km² of the surrounding country¹. Jane Fejfer and Hans Erik Mathiesen directed the Aarhus University mission from 1989 to 1991². The work combined excavation at Ayios Kononas with geomorphological investigation and intensive surface survey, and in 1990 the ancient road systems of the western Akamas were studied¹.

House AK 113, in the southern part of the site, had two complexes, possibly representing different phases of use, and a coin of Constans dated AD 347/8 came from one corner¹. Keane calls the site a Christianised villa rustica or perhaps farmstead³. The basilica produced glass fragments, seven copper coins possibly of Byzantine date, a limestone ex-voto breast, an amethyst gem, carved capitals and gypsum paving slabs¹. Steel reports that the Byzantine houses (AK 107, 109, 111, 115 and 132) were built in the sixth century AD and abandoned in the eighth; finds included cooking pots, fish and goat bones, lead fishing weights and fishing hooks¹. A depression cut into the bedrock in the central area proved to be part of a quarry, which appears to have been used as a dump after the major Early Byzantine building¹. Metal slag lay across the site, with a large concentration in the north-west¹.

The survey found high settlement activity in the Middle and Late Chalcolithic, little from the Late Chalcolithic to the Hellenistic period, and substantial activity in the Late Roman and Byzantine periods¹. The road study identified a road connecting the Akamas with Cape Kara, Cape Drepanon and the Paphos area, which Steel reports appears to be Roman or Byzantine¹. Keane reports that the basilica collapsed in the eighth century and that the site was occupied into the ninth and tenth centuries³. The first two seasons, 1989 and 1990, were reported by Fejfer and Mathiesen in Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus for 1991, and the site study appeared in Fejfer's Ancient Akamas I (Aarhus, 1995)³.