Kakoskalin, Ayios Sozomenos: deep soundings under the alluvium (2003)

In 2003 the geomorphologist Benoît Devillers directed deep cuttings in the plain at Kakoskalin, below the Ayios Sozomenos plateau of the Bronze Age tombs, to look for the settlement that belonged with them¹. Devillers had argued, from the geology and the nature of the river, that the settlement lay buried under alluvium; the cuttings followed a remark he made in 2002¹. He took part in the work of the Aix-en-Provence team led by Nolwenn Lécuyer at nearby Potamia¹.

Pamela Gaber reports evidence of an extensive Bronze Age urban centre, which she presents as the Bronze Age predecessor of Idalion and dates to about 1900–1000 BCE¹. She lists much Middle Cypriot black and red polished ware, a few incised pieces that appear Late Cypriot I, and one or two Proto-Geometric fragments that she thinks suggest overlap with the earliest levels at Idalion¹. Michael Brown describes the work as a trial sounding that revealed Late Cypriot occupation under about 4 m of sediment, and notes that this overburden precludes a reliable determination of settlement extent².

Devillers's own thesis describes a trench there, Kak01, dug with a mechanical excavator across a cultivated terrace; it revealed a 4 m thick sequence of fourteen units³. Units 2 to 5 held construction blocks, mortar, ceramics and small statues of Cypro-Geometric I and Archaic date, over an older alluvial unit, and Devillers reads this debris as eroded from a nearby building³. The ceramics of the lowest of these units could be attributed only to the Bronze Age³. The report on the settlement by Devillers, Gaber and Lecuyer appeared in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus for 2004, pp. 85–92¹. The thesis was published as BAR International Series 1775 in 2008³.