Episkopi-Phaneromeni: the University of Missouri trial excavations

At Phaneromeni in 1955 Saul S. Weinberg tested an Early Bronze Age settlement and the cemetery beside it, and left a large tomb complex in Trench 4 unexcavated. The work was a single preliminary campaign at Episkopi-Phaneromeni for the University of Missouri, funded by the university's Research Council; the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus allocated the Phaneromeni area for excavation¹. The expedition took to the field in March and worked for seven weeks, with J. S. Last as surveyor and architect¹. Weinberg framed the campaign against the scarcity of stratified settlement evidence for the Early and Middle Bronze Age, and listed among his questions the plans and architecture of settlements and their relationship to cemeteries¹.

The first week went on walking the area to assess surface indications; test trenches followed¹. In Trench 5 and nearby irrigation channels, foundations about two feet thick carried mud-brick walls, with three successive beaten-earth floors. Weinberg dated these buildings from their pottery to Early Cypriot II, 2300 to 2200 B.C. In Trench 6 a habitation level held a large storage jar, charcoal, burnt brick, broken pottery, stones, a fragment of brick wall and a white plaster floor. Weinberg read the traces as a violent conflagration and put the pottery at the very end of the Early Bronze Age, about 2000 B.C.¹.

Twelve chamber tombs were excavated in the cemetery. Weinberg reports use in Early Cypriot II, with some chambers possibly continuing later. More than eighty pottery pieces came from them, with three bronze pins, two bronze daggers or spearheads and a few spindle whorls; Tomb 12 held twenty-five vases and was described as the richest¹. Trench 4 exposed a long rock-cut dromos with four chamber entrances on either side and a collapsed chamber at the north end. Weinberg counted nine chambers, thought at least one more likely, and backfilled the trench without finishing the excavation. He presented Phaneromeni as the first Early Cypriot cemetery on the south coast to be systematically excavated¹.

Weinberg published an illustrated account, "Exploring the Early Bronze Age in Cyprus", in Archaeology in 1956¹, and the 1955 annual report summarised the trials². Carpenter's later account of the Kent State University excavations identifies the locations of most of Weinberg's trial trenches³.