Ayios Sozomenos: the ASESP survey

Despina Pilides's project in the Agios Sozomenos area excavated forts, a storage building and a workshop complex of the Middle and Late Bronze Age; before it, none of the forts had been excavated¹. Pilides, Curator of Antiquities, directed the Agios Sozomenos Excavations and Survey Project for the Department of Antiquities from its start in 2012 until the final season in 2021^1,2. Survey used GIS and geophysics and was completed in 2016; excavation was problem-oriented, meant to establish chronological overlaps between sites and the role of the plateau forts, which had been assumed to be part of a defensive system protecting copper routes to the coast, particularly Enkomi¹.

At Barsak the work exposed an inner wall at least 2 m thick, an outer wall on bedrock, a deep rock-cut ditch and a plastered corridor about 15 m wide; the pottery included White Painted and Red Polished IV¹. At Nikolides a 15 x 7.5 m ashlar-faced tower with a stone staircase joined a circuit wall at least 3.20 m wide; the tower was most likely added later, and the pottery points to LC I and II, later than Barsak¹. At Dziropoulos part of a workshop building had two phases from the beginning of LC I to LC II, with a cobbled courtyard, a mould, slag and a bronze axe bearing an engraved Cypro-Minoan sign¹. The 2021 season confirmed the two phases, with destruction in the later, and recovered a stone trough, a stone vat and a copper pin and pendant². At Ampelia a storage building had an 11.6 x 3.3 m room with a gypsum plaster floor and stone bases for 13 to 16 large pithoi, and showed traces of heavy fire in its western part; radiocarbon dates from burnt floor areas give the 12th century BC as a possible terminus ante quem¹.

Pilides argues that Dziropoulos belonged to the same settlement as Ampelia, and that the forts, Ampelia and the workshops formed an organised elite system under imminent threat of conflict, ending in destruction and abandonment¹. She dates the destruction of the Dziropoulos workshops to the 12th century BCE, possibly in relation to climatic change and periods of aridity³.