Athienou-Bamboulari tis Koukounninas: the Hebrew University Excavations

On a hillock of about 2,500 sq m at Athienou-Bamboulari tis Koukounninas, the Hebrew University's excavators found heaps of hundreds of votive vessels in a courtyard, some 2,000 of them intact, and beside the building plastered platforms and channels holding lumps of copper¹. Trude Dothan and Amnon Ben-Tor directed both campaigns, in 1971 and 1972, for the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem^1,2.

A site chosen for the Institute

The Institute was founded in 1970 and wished to extend its research beyond Israel. It sought a Cypriot site of the 16th to 12th centuries BCE, a period culminating in the settlement of the Sea Peoples, and Karageorghis suggested Athienou after a preliminary survey by the two directors, Yigael Yadin and Joseph Aviram¹. Yadin was the initiator and fund-raiser, and obtained the blessing of Archbishop Makarios, then president of Cyprus¹. Thirty villagers of Athienou formed the workforce, and twenty students of the Institute took part for field experience in what was the Institute's first excavation outside Israel¹. The Department of Antiquities had already made a trial excavation at the site in 1958, of about 30 soundings over two days; the 1971 team could not obtain a plan of those soundings and had to rediscover them¹.

The 1971 campaign covered a small area of the hillock. A north-south wall was traced; east of it lay plastered platforms with ash and traces of intense fire, large pithoi set on them and along the wall, and copper slag, which the directors read as metalworking workshops. West of the wall were piles of crude miniature vases, each pile of several hundred pieces, read as votive offerings in a cult place³. The second campaign aimed to establish the stratigraphic and chronological sequence and to test the link between the metalworking installations and the groups of votive miniature vessels. By its end about 90% of the site had been excavated to virgin soil^2,4.

The hillock rose only about 2 m, with under 1 m of deposit, eroded in the south and southwest, ploughed and pitted by olive planting; the plans rest largely on projected walls, robber and foundation trenches and plaster lines¹. Area A, Area B and Area C were under separate supervisors, Dov Grossovich, Baruch Brandl and Yaakov Baumgarten, with Yuval Portugali as architect and surveyor¹.

The four strata

The final report names four strata. Stratum IV consists of four loci, large shallow circular depressions cut into virgin soil, possibly the remains of huts, with no sign of metalworking or cult vessels¹. Stratum III runs from the late 16th to the end of the 13th century BCE, with its bulk in the 14th and 13th; Stratum II belongs to the 12th century, dated by Mycenaean IIIC pottery, and settlement ceased in the mid-12th century. Iron Age Stratum I is represented by faint traces, a handful of sherds, two fragmentary walls and a few pits¹. The 1973 notice numbered the same phases the other way round, from I for the Iron Age to IV for the earliest².

In Stratum III a public building of about 20 by 20 m seems to have had a large central courtyard flanked by rooms on the north and east. It was altered and still used in Stratum II, at whose end it was destroyed; the south and west slopes were stripped, so no plan could be restored there². The votive vessels lay mostly in the courtyard: some 2,000 intact, about 10,000 counting representative body fragments, which the report describes as the largest such concentration found at one Cypriot site. Miniature copies of Bucchero, Base Ring, White Shaved and Mycenaean types lay beside many crude non-imitative forms. Heaps of clay, a large stone basin and misfired or warped vessels led the excavators to infer manufacture on the spot¹.

In Stratum II, rectangular platforms of small stones and pithos sherds with fire-scorched plaster lay on the east, flanked by large pithoi, some with wavy relief bands. On the northeast a plaster platform of about 100 sq m had a network of channels holding lumps of copper. The excavators judged them copper-working installations similar to those at Enkomi and Kition; no crucibles or tuyeres were found¹. About half a ton of copper ore and slag was recorded, the biggest lumps about 25 kg¹. The metal working chapter, by Maddin, James D. Muhly and Tamara Stech Wheeler, argues that the nodules show Athienou was a smelting site, though with no direct evidence of melting and refining¹.

East of the building were many pits of three types: cylindrical, about 6 m deep; bell-shaped, about 4 m deep; and shallow circular, about 1.5 m. The cylindrical ones were used as wells, workshop or storage pits and then filled with discarded objects¹. The special finds, among them an ivory rhyton and Mycenaean and Minoan vessels, came from pits east of the building. Pit 543 held bone, ash, shells, sea urchins, Myc. IIIC pottery and a bull's brow and horns^1,2. The ivory rhyton, Reg. No. 3072, is about 12.5 cm high and carries four incised bands of human heads, birds, gazelles(?), fish and plants¹. A pithos rim bore a deeply incised Cypro-Minoan inscription of probably seven signs, six readable, according to Emilia Masson².

Cult and copper

Dothan and Ben-Tor conclude that metal working at Athienou, begun as early as the 14th to 13th centuries BCE, was connected with a cult, and that Athienou was a station on the trade route from the mining area to the east-coast marketing centres¹. Kassianidou, quoted by Karageorghis, finds it difficult to identify Athienou as a copper production centre, questioning the traditional belief that metallurgy in Cyprus was associated with religion; Karageorghis suggests that part, if not most, of the material was associated with a feast⁵. Meneghetti notes that the final report lacks a complete catalogue of the miniature vessels and a study of their function, and that some are not true miniatures⁶.

Publication and the finds

The final report appeared as Qedem 16 in 1983, with chapters on stratigraphy, pottery, special finds and metal working^1,7. A selection of the material was brought to the Israel Museum in spring 1974 and exhibited, which let the authors study it with the Institute's facilities¹. Where the finds are now is not recorded.