Idalion: Pamela Gaber's excavations (New Hampshire, Arizona and Lycoming College)

In 1993 a six-week season on the East Acropolis at Idalion showed that the "temple" described by Lang was a large outdoor temenos ringed by a peribolos wall enclosing about six acres, with rock-cut pits that may be tree pits, terracotta horse figures and a rock-cut oven¹. The season belonged to a series of excavations directed by Pamela Gaber that began in 1987 and continued, by Gaber's own account, until 2017².

Soundings in 1987 and the Arizona seasons

The first season, in 1987, was an exploratory one under the University of New Hampshire, for which Gaber reports receiving a permit from the Department of Antiquities^3,4. It sought to fill historical gaps about the West Acropolis terrace and to sound a room of Lower City Building B, where ash and destruction debris had been uncovered in 1978 by the American Expedition to Idalion⁴. Three probes were sunk, two in the monumental architecture of the West Acropolis terrace and one in the Lower City^1,3,4. On the terrace the northern monumental building's foundation proved to be no later than the seventh century BCE and possibly earlier; Gaber reports massive sandstone walls demolished around the time Kition took Idalion, followed by rebuilding at a higher level^3,4. In Building B the probe found a burnt subterranean room with a Cypro-Classical I-II floor over Cypro-Archaic pits; Gaber describes the fire as localized to one room used for olive-oil production^1,4.

The University of Arizona took over in 1992, with William G. Dever as associate director⁵. The grid for the work had been established by Maria Hadjicosti of the Department of Antiquities⁵. Gaber had found sculpture fragments in a ravine behind the East Acropolis in 1987 and chose to look for Lang's lost sanctuary there⁵. The foreman, George Demosthenous, alerted the team to steps on Moutti tou Arvili; the team converted Lang's published plan to metric measures, laid a 6 m grid over it, and found the northeast corner of his Building E within two days^1,5. In 1993 the grid there grew to eleven 5 x 5 m squares, and Lang's "Building E" proved to be walls of at least two structures in at least three phases, mostly of Hellenistic material, 3rd to 1st century BCE, with a few Roman sherds in the latest levels¹. Gaber reports that work at Moutti tou Arvili from 1992 to 2001 exposed an outdoor sanctuary founded in the Late Geometric or Early Archaic period and used into the Roman period; she interprets it as dedicated to the Wanax, later called Adonis, and proposes that it may be the first known sanctuary to Adonis⁴.

Dever and Gaber framed the Lower City work as a test of a conquest and collapse model, asking whether the mid-fifth-century destruction of the West Acropolis elite buildings disturbed ordinary occupation¹. They argue that conquest did not lead to collapse: the West Acropolis buildings were destroyed about 450 BCE and about 300 BCE while Lower City domestic and industrial areas continued, and they link the conquerors' motive to Idalion's copper trade¹. Rupp singles out Gaber's 1992 Lower City excavations as a rare Iron Age exception to the pattern of excavating monumental rather than domestic and industrial quarters⁶.

In Building B the 1992 team dated the substantial house walls to the Hellenistic period, about the 2nd century BCE, over fifth-century phases, where Stager and Walker had dated them to the late sixth to late fifth centuries BCE¹. North of the basement room they uncovered a paved pressing floor with two kidney-shaped vats joined by a stone channel, read as small-scale olive-oil production, and east of the building horn cores that may indicate a horn-working area¹. In 1997 the Lower City work added a rectangular room with a ramp beside oil-production Building B, a pit 4 m across holding votive material of the 7th century BCE to Hellenistic date, and a Cypro-Archaic workshop with worked horn and a metallurgical installation⁷.

The City Sanctuary

The Lower City bothros was discovered in 1995 and fully excavated by 1998; it held votive material mainly of Cypro-Archaic date, with many finds earlier^4,8. In 1998 excavation went south of it in search of industrial installations, and three small east-west probe trenches uncovered substantial structures that later work identified as the City Sanctuary⁸. By 2008 the Lycoming College expedition, which Gaber says followed the Arizona expedition after 2001, was running a seven-week field school there with 32 graduate and undergraduate students and volunteers from six countries^4,9.

A deposit of smashed glass vessels turned up in square EK 15 in 2002, in Roman levels close to the plough zone, and Gaber reports that it was delivered to the Department of Antiquities for conservation⁸. Trenches east of the original squares in 2003 and 2004 revealed altars with ash pits, and standing stones came to light in trench EN 15 in 2004⁸. In 2009 the eastern end of the sanctuary gave parallel walls, mudbrick structures and a deep plaster-lined pit with bone, a sculpture fragment and two Cypro-syllabic inscriptions¹⁰. Garth Gilmour directed the 2012 season, when the standing stones in EN 15 were removed and intense burning and charcoal were found beneath them; Gaber reports the sampled wood as Mediterranean oak⁸. Work in square EM 15 in 2015 revealed a Hellenistic plaster basin, and in 2017 Andrew M. Wright's probe in the southwest corner of EO 17 showed Hellenistic architecture below the Roman floor, with no gap in occupation^2,8.

Gaber identifies seven phases in the sanctuary, from Proto-Geometric, approximately 1150–1000 BCE, to Late Roman/Byzantine, fourth to eighth centuries CE. She reports use from at least the eleventh century BCE into the first century CE, a break, and later activity in the fourth to eighth centuries CE⁸. She reports 28 Cypro-syllabic inscriptions from it by the time of her 2024 account⁸. She argues that the burning of possible wooden xoana, alongside the destruction at the West Acropolis administrative centre, suggests that Kition's violence was targeted, and she presents both the identification of the wood and the meaning of the destruction as interpretations⁸.

Finds, records and the latest seasons

About 2,000 of the 47,000 registered finds and sherds from the 1987–2017 excavations have been photographed and turned in to the Cyprus Museum, Nicosia¹¹. Gaber and Wright state that all the notebooks for the Terrace of the East Acropolis have been turned over to the Department of Antiquities, and that about 120,000 items from the paper record have been entered in OCHRE since 2018¹².

In 2024 the project ran as the "American Expedition to Idalion Redux", with Gaber as director and Wright of the University of Chicago as associate director; the team recorded almost entirely digitally in OCHRE and used two Emlid RTK receivers over a permanent benchmark^12,13. The 2024 season ran from 17 June to 15 July and the 2025 season from 2 to 23 June, with baulk removal in earlier fields¹⁴.