Erimi-Pamboula: the University of Athens renewed excavation

In July 2025 the first season of a new excavation at the Chalcolithic settlement of Erimi-Pamboula exposed a pit of burnt deer bones and antler, a house floor with a built platform, and picrolite pebbles, half-finished jewellery and a partly preserved cruciform figurine¹. The site is the settlement first excavated by Porphyrios Dikaios in 1933–35; the new campaign has a different sponsor¹. Giorgos Vavouranakis directed it for the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, with The Cyprus Institute, Freie Universität Berlin and the Université de Strasbourg as partners. Evi Margaritis of the Cyprus Institute cooperated with her team, and the Department of Antiquities is named as host¹.

According to the announcement, the research aimed to create a stratigraphic sequence and to re-frame what is already known about the site, and it started close to Dikaios's original excavation area. An Erasmus short mobility educational programme run by the University of Athens and the Cyprus Institute formed part of the excavation¹.

The season exposed the floor of a house with a pit and a built platform, the wall of a round building, and part of a rectilinear wall or other built feature. Animal bone, mainly deer, was recovered in significant quantities. The finds included many sherds, numerous with Red-on-White decoration, ground stone (axes, adzes, rubbers, querns) and chipped stone including scrapers¹. The announcement dates the settlement to c. 3500–2900 BC; monochrome sherds from layers over the apparently last settlement phase are taken to point to activity within the first half of the 3rd millennium BC¹.