Erimi-Pitharka: Department of Antiquities excavations, 2001–2010

In 2001 a bulldozer working during construction at Erimi-Pitharka opened a large hole in the soft havara bedrock leading to seven subterranean chambers¹. The Limassol museum excavated one chamber fully and two partly and cleared the rest of surface finds¹. Steel describes chambers 2.6 to 7 m wide, linked by corridors and entered originally by a long sloping dromos to the south-east, with pillars, benches, hearths, tethering holes and niches¹. She dates the pottery to the 12th and 11th centuries BC, mainly pithoi, plain white jugs and bowls, with an imported pilgrim flask and a pictorial Mycenaean krater rim, finds no evidence that the chambers were ever tombs, and reads the evidence as domestic activity and manufacture or storage¹. Andreou, summarising the report by Vassiliou and Stylianou (2004), gives the date as LC IIC-LC IIIA, extended to LC IIIB by Proto-White Painted ware, with over 35% of the pottery pithos fragments².

In 2007 the Department of Antiquities began an Interreg IIIA programme on the caves of Ellinokamara, Kasos and Erimi-Pitharka, funded by the European Regional Development Fund³. Anthi Kaldeli conducted the 2008 excavation, which completed the excavation of all the remaining chambers of Cave 1 with stratigraphic analysis, and Eleni Procopiou was project coordinator³. The team found benches, two hearths, the curved wall of a built antechamber, circular stone bases and paving probably linked to work activities, and an oval construction with intense firing traces inside and ventilation holes low down, identified as a basin or possibly a kiln³. The finds were Late Bronze Age wares, many lithic tools, pithos and storage-jar fragments, burnt clay and possible pithos wasters; the report calls them supporting evidence for a probable ceramic production role in the cave, while noting that no production centre had yet been archaeologically identified³. Andreou reports that Flourentzos (2010) took the complex published by Vassiliou and Stylianou as a workshop, with his later exploration suggesting a cult or administrative complex; she argues that no secured context supports a ritual area². The Interreg work was completed in 2009, and a study for a small shelter over the cave entrance was finished⁴. Andreou treats a comprehensive publication of the 2007–2008 revisit and excavation as still awaited².