Aradippou-Panayia Ematousa: the University of Copenhagen excavations

At Panayia Ematousa near Aradippou, a Danish team uncovered a Late Hellenistic and Early Roman complex of small rooms and subterranean cellars, set over earlier and much larger walls¹. Lone Wriedt Sørensen directed the work for the University of Copenhagen, with the Danish Research Councils and the Community of Aradippou as sponsors^1,2. A survey in 1990 found Archaic to Roman sherds and stone tools on the plateau south of the church; 12 trial trenches followed in 1991, and month-long seasons ran from 1993 to 1999^1,3. The excavators aimed to learn about villages and farmsteads, which they called virtually unknown on the island¹. Each trench in the grid of 5 by 5 m squares was dug by a group of five students under an instructor³.

The later phase has walls about 0.5 m wide of dressed field stones, rooms up to 2 by 2 m, slab floors, benches and bins¹. Subterranean rooms I to VI, plastered and roofed with stone slabs, were probably storage areas or cellars¹. Limestone counterweights, fragments of stone basins possibly used for crushing and settling olive oil, and mill fragments are among the finds Sørensen's report links to olive-oil production¹. Beneath the south wall lay an earlier wall of large slabs and blocks with a blocked window and door; the excavators compared such buildings with ones at Idalion, Amathus and Palaipaphos "sometimes referred to as palaces"¹. The report dates the earlier phase by its ceramics to the Late Classical?/Hellenistic period¹. Steel, reporting 1997, says that walls below the monumental building were larger and that their pottery suggests a Cypro-Archaic date, and that the excavators tentatively suggest the remains may belong to a palace⁴. Pit 2 held Archaic figurines beside a slab box that "could have been used as an altar"¹. Sørensen reads the site as a rural habitation making olive oil and other necessities, and calls it premature to assign a category¹. Herscher thinks the earlier architecture suggests more than a village⁵.

Finds were registered each season for handing over to the Larnaca Museum³. A two-week survey of the surrounding area in 2000, reported by C. Methenitis, followed the last season³. Final results appeared in Panayia Ematousa I (2006), edited by L. Wriedt Sørensen and Kristina Winther Jacobsen³.