Episkopi-Phaneromeni: the Kent State University excavations

At Phaneromeni, east of Episkopi, Kent State University excavated a Late Cypriot IA settlement of two irregular, multi-room complexes with courtyards, divided by a road; collapsed walls, smashed pottery and ash led the excavator to conclude that it had burned¹. James R. Carpenter directed the work in the summers of 1975 to 1978, with Stuart Swiny as his assistant director^1,2,3. Kent State University sponsored the project. The National Geographic Society funded it in 1975 and the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1976; the Cleveland Foundation appears as a funder in the 1978 report^2,3,4.

Aims and invitation

Carpenter says the excavation grew out of an invitation from Karageorghis to undertake a more extensive excavation of the site, and that Weinberg made his 1955 records available¹. Weinberg's 1955 season (the University of Missouri trial excavations) had been cut short by Cypriot independence politics, as Swiny later put it⁵. Carpenter aimed to obtain settlement architecture and ceramic evidence from Early, Middle and Late Cypriot IA contexts, because architectural data were deficient and ceramic typologies based on tomb material alone had led to misdating¹. The project also sought to develop lithic, metal and terracotta typologies and to extend knowledge of southern Cypriot Bronze Age settlement patterns through systematic surface survey¹.

The settlement and the tombs

The 1975 season examined a settlement in the southern sector and a necropolis of Early and Middle Bronze Age tombs in the north. Two houses separated by a street were identified, and the settlement was reported as destroyed by fire; the 1975 report dated it to the final Middle Bronze Age². The 1976 report dated Sector A to Late Cypriot IA and found, in a northern sondage, a separate, plough-damaged settlement probably of Middle Cypriot II-III⁴. Carpenter's final account also dates the Area A settlement and its destruction to Late Cypriot IA, relying especially on Proto-White Slip pottery¹.

The 1977 season added rooms and courtyards to the two complexes. The report says the settlement's northern, eastern and southern limits had been reached, while it continued west beneath a vineyard, and it describes mud-brick and wood superstructures over stone foundations, plastered features, hearths, benches and storage pithoi⁶. Carpenter reports 34 lime-plaster bins and lower wall courses of riverstones and havara¹. He presents the Area A complexes as the most extensive of their period excavated in Cyprus thus far¹.

The pottery included local Red Polished Punctured ware, which made up 37 percent of the Area A assemblage, along with Red Polished IV and Blue Core wares and the non-local Proto-White Slip and White Painted wares¹. Other finds were ground and chipped stone tools, serpentine jewelry, terracotta spindle whorls, copper objects and two fragments of a terracotta crucible with arsenical-copper prills¹. Paul Craddock of the British Museum analysed the metalwork; Carpenter reports no tin in any of it, and says the crucible fragments were the only evidence for metalworking at the site¹. Flotation samples were sparse, giving lentil, grape and apple-or-pear seeds and no cereals in Area A¹.

In Area G, Middle Bronze Age settlement remains were fragmentary and found only in Trench G4. Carpenter put this settlement earlier than Area A on the evidence of its pottery and the absence of Proto-White Slip¹. He thinks the survivors of the Area A settlement seem to have moved to Bamboula¹.

Six intact tombs were excavated in the necropolis, Area C, in 1975 and 1976. They were rock-cut, with dromoi and chambers, some with multiple chambers and multiple burials, and Carpenter considered the burials to range from perhaps Early Cypriot III to the beginning of Middle Cypriot III¹. T. 24b held 26 vessels, which the 1975 report assigned to Early Cypriot II; Carpenter, citing Red Polished I South Coast ware, later argued for an Early Cypriot III date, and notes that the tomb had been disturbed by looters^1,2. Tomb 25d, intact, contained 14 Red Polished III Mottled vessels and a terracotta spindle whorl; Tomb 25c, also intact, held seven Red Polished Mottled vessels, two Drab Polished vessels, an incised Brown Polished bottle, spindle whorls and serpentine jewelry⁴. Tomb 23 d had two chambers, with 12 vases and two burials in the larger and eight vases and one burial in the second, and necklaces of small beads in both¹. Carpenter noted that no excavated tomb was contemporary with the Area A settlement¹.

Sector J and the 1978 survey

The 1978 season, with staff and students from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, turned to Sector J, on the Limassol-Paphos road at the western end of the site. The report records several looted tombs that seem to be Middle Cypriot, one intact Middle Cypriot I tomb with 18 Red Polished III and Red Polished III Mottled vessels, and part of a Late Cypriot IA house destroyed by fire³.

In the same season Swiny and Kent State students surveyed the region to locate contemporary sites. The report discusses nine sites: all but Erimi-Kafkalla had been occupied in the early Middle Cypriot and abandoned around the end of that period, while Erimi-Kafkalla continued into the Late Cypriot³. The survey produced five previously unrecorded sites and a more complete study of 13 additional ones¹. A later summary of Swiny's work states that the Phaneromeni ceramic typology allowed the sites, from Chalcolithic III (Philia) to Late Cypriot IA, to be seriated⁷.

Publication

Carpenter published his account of the excavations in Studies in Cypriote Archaeology in 1981, and expected the study of the pottery by Ellen Herscher, who wrote the pottery chapter of the same volume¹. Swiny later counted Phaneromeni as the start of the change in understanding of the prehistoric Bronze Age settlements⁵. In 1985 he reported that the full report, with architecture by Carpenter, ceramics by Herscher and lithics, metal and terracottas by Swiny, was due shortly in the SIMA series⁸. Swiny's 1986 volume is The Kent State University Expedition to Episkopi Phaneromeni, Part 2 (SIMA 74:2)⁹.