Idalion: the American Expedition to Idalion

On the West Terrace of Idalion, the final campaign of the American Expedition to Idalion in 1980 recorded a citadel wall 10.50 m thick with a tower or gate at its north-west corner, an east-west street resurfaced three or four times, and a large public building with a sandstone pier^1,2.

Planning the dig

The site had been assigned to the Institute for Cypriot Studies at SUNY Albany, and Paul W. Lapp was asked to form a team and lead the 1970 excavation; he died a few days before it was to begin^3,4. Work in 1970 was limited to a mapping and cadastral surface survey by Overbeck of SUNY Albany and some reconnaissance, and the survey was used to choose the 1971 areas^3,4. In January 1971 the State Department's Bureau of Cultural Affairs asked the American Schools of Oriental Research to revive the project³.

G. Ernest Wright directed from 1971; Lawrence E. Stager and Anita M. Walker were field directors, Stager for the West Acropolis and West Terrace and Walker for the Lower City^2,3. Wright died in August 1974, and Stager and Walker then served as project directors until 1980^2,5. Pamela Gaber was associate director in 1977 to 1979 and acting field director in 1978². Co-sponsors were the Institute, the University of Connecticut, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and the Semitic Museum of Harvard University^2,6.

The stated broad aim was to study how settlement pattern and type vary with economic system in the Dhali region, about 65 square kilometres, and how they change over time². The 1974 report of Stager, Walker and Wright set as its working hypothesis that Idalion's economy was tied to exploiting local metal sources, so metallurgical workshops and smelters were to be sought³. Areas were dug stratigraphically to bedrock by the Wheeler-Kenyon method³.

The Lower City, the East Terrace and the city wall

The pilot season ran from 9 August to 4 September 1971, with some thirty staff and volunteers, and opened trial areas on the East and West Acropoleis and in the Lower City^3,6. Late Mycenaean IIIB and White Slip sherds from the first week on the West Acropolis moved the beginning of Idalion there back from the 12th to the 13th century BC³. The seven-week season of 1972 added an intensive survey of the Lower City, which sampled one 30 m square in eight, and soundings there^3,7.

In the Lower City the diggers uncovered an apsidal Archaic house with at least three rooms near the centre⁷. Building 1 was built in the late 6th to early 5th century BC, and Building 5 was a well-house whose shaft was dug to about 5 m without reaching the bottom³. Work in 1973, 1976 and 1977 reached the central residential quarter: houses, courts and streets of the Cypro-Archaic to Cypro-Classical transition, Cypro-Archaic pits below them, and rooms of a Cypro-Classical Building B^8,9,10.

The dating of the city wall changed as the work went on. Karageorghis's report on the 1972 season called the Lower City section Archaic, and his report on 1973 said its foundations were certainly Cypro-Classical. The 1974 report placed the first wall in the 7th or 6th century BC on early evidence, and the final volume dates it to about 475 BC^2,3,7,8.

On the East Terrace, supervised by Miranda C. Marvin and then by Ralph W. Doermann, Wright judged the 1971 pottery almost pure 1st century AD, and Karageorghis reports the city's end as c. AD 50–75^3,6. The lower terraces gave occupation from the last quarter of the 3rd century BC into the Graeco-Roman period, with ten stratified coins dating the Hellenistic pottery¹¹.

The West Terrace

A copper-industry area was begun on the West Terrace in 1971³. It held mud-brick platforms and refuse heaps of copper slag, 130 of the 150 kg from the area coming from Slag Heap 007; body sherds suggested a date in the second half of the 4th century BC for the start of the slag deposits³. A Greek ostracon, T. 54/308, listing the gates of Idalion with the Tamassian gate first, was found in 1972 in a mud brick of the platform and published by Cross; Cross dated it c. 300 BC^3,7.

The work of 1977 to 1980 turned to the monumental architecture. In 1977 the inner face of the citadel wall stood over 5 m high in twenty-two courses, a sandstone facade lay to the north, and a building about 15 m inside the wall carried a two-line Cypriot syllabic inscription^2,10. In June and July 1978 a section dug on the inside face showed a wall over 8 m thick founded on two older Cypro-Archaic domestic walls, and the north edge of the terrace gave the corner of a massive ashlar building, read as possibly the administrative centre or royal palace; three small ostraka, two Phoenician and one Cypriot syllabic, came from the wall sector⁵.

In 1980, under Stager, the stone robbers' backfill was cleared first to obtain a negative plan of the buildings². The season produced five Phoenician ostraka, a Cypriot syllabic inscription and a bronze helmet cheek-piece pierced by a weapon, found in the street behind the wall under the collapsed wall¹.

The excavators call the structures east of the citadel wall the most massive monumental architecture found at Idalion; the earliest excavated use phases of the Area D building date to the first half of the 5th century BC². Stager and Walker date the fortifications and the West Terrace Palace to about 475 BC, the start of Cypro-Classical I, and say the complex was destroyed by an invading army late in the 4th century BC and never rebuilt². The Phoenician ostraca suggest to them that the Room in Area D was remodelled after the Phoenicians of Kition took over Idalion in 450–425 BC, although Cross dated the Phoenician inscriptions palaeographically to the fourth century BC². They conclude that the complex was the administrative centre of Idalion in the 5th and 4th centuries BC and use this against Gjerstad's date of c. 470 BC for the end of the kingdom, placing the Kitian takeover and the sack of the Lower City c. 450 BC². Gaber summarises the result as a palace founded around 475 BC with a long period of use, thus refuting Gjerstad's date¹².

Survey, Dhali-Agridhi and Teredhia

Survey ran beside the digging: around Idalion in 1973, on the Ayios Sozomenos plateau in 1974, and in the copper-mining area in 1975 and 1976². The sounding at Neolithic Dhali-Agridhi, begun in 1972, was a rescue measure against dredging³. It found two floors under many animal bones, and in 1976 an extensive, intensive and at least semi-permanent occupation^2,7,9. Two radiocarbon determinations, 4465 +/- 310 BCE and 5340 +/- 465 BCE, overlap Khirokitia in part^3,9. At Teredhia, near Lythrodonda, soundings from 1975 uncovered a late medieval foundry workshop with a slag heap and an enclosure holding a pithos sunk in rock^9,13.

Publication and the site today

The first preliminary report, American Expedition to Idalion, Cyprus: First Preliminary Report, Seasons of 1971 and 1972, appeared in 1974³. The final volume, American Expedition to Idalion, Cyprus 1973–1980, is Oriental Institute Communications 24 (1989), and a further volume on the artifacts was announced². Material not discarded after examination by the specialists was stored in Cyprus or sent to the USA for analysis³. About two hundred fragmentary limestone seated kourotrophoi and 32 limestone temple-boys, mostly from the 1973 survey in square A.4 west of the West Acropolis, are the subject of Cecilia Beer's 1997 study¹⁴. Andrew M. Wright reports that the expedition's find registers, 889 pages recording almost 7,800 finds, have been scanned for a digital database¹⁵.

The 1974 war and its aftermath closed access to about one third of the area of interest in the Dhali region². When the 1973–1980 volume was written, the East Acropolis, West Acropolis and East Terrace were off limits for further excavation, and the Department of Antiquities had undertaken to consolidate the excavated remains².