Khirokitia: the French Mission under Le Brun

At Khirokitia, the long stone structure that Dikaios had read as a road turned out, in the trenches of the French mission under Alain Le Brun, to be a perimeter wall, and the east of the village proved to be older than the west¹. In Le Brun's account this made Khirokitia a walled village¹. The mission worked there from 1976 to 2009^2,3.

The 1976 campaign

After the Turkish invasion of 1974 the Cypriot authorities decided to reopen Khirokitia as part of a new research programme¹. The campaign of August and September 1976, a joint one with the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, was directed by N. Stanley Price and Le Brun, and set out to establish the extent of the settlement and to re-study the structure Dikaios had called a road². It resumed the work of the earlier Dikaios campaign of 1936 to 1946⁴.

The team collected surface finds systematically over the whole hill and ran a soil-resistivity survey, with A. Hesse and S. Renimel of the C.N.R.S. geophysical centre at Garchy, then checked the results with test trenches 1 m deep². Four control soundings (Tr. 7 to 10) west of Dikaios's area found no occupation, showing that the settlement did not extend far in that direction². In the east, a section known as Tr. 6 had been cut by a road in 1971, about 150 m from Dikaios's area near the Maroni. It was cleaned and recorded: 12 layers with three main habitation levels, including a brick-built oval structure, S. 76, preserved to about 1.20 m². Five trenches across the 'road', structure 100, showed several phases of construction and rebuilding².

The west sector, 1977 to 1981

From 1977 the work was run by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique as a French mission under Le Brun, with the aim of fixing the limits of the settlement and gathering information on building techniques and the spatial organisation of the village⁵. The annual reports name Le Brun as the sole director; Astruc describes Odile Daune-Le Brun as co-director as well^5,6. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs is recorded as funder in 1980⁷.

In 1977 the team opened 180 m2 northwest of Dikaios's zone V and west of the 'Main Road'. It found three building levels of the Aceramic Neolithic, seven circular dwellings and two pit burials, an adult and a child⁵. The 1978 season added 75 m2 and six circular units. A wall about 1 m thick (245/263), some 6 m west of structure 100, marked the western limit, and the finds included bone tools, andesite bowl fragments, a mother-of-pearl pendant and an arrowhead⁸. By 1980 the excavated area had doubled. Level III had six dwelling units, five of them around a plastered space with a grain-grinding installation (loc. 289)⁷.

In 1981 the excavators showed that, in the area dug, every construction west of wall 100 is later than it. Wall 284, about 3 m high and traced for over 15 m, closed the built area at Level III, and a red-ochre wall painting was found at Khirokitia for the first time; its motif could not be made out⁹. S. Davis, M.-C. Cauvin and D. Stordeur reported on the fauna, the chipped stone and the worked bone⁹.

The dead lay in pit graves under house floors, with little or no grave goods. A stone, a quern or, in burial 538, a deer scapula was set over the skull in several cases^9,10. Burial 290, dug in 1980, was an adult in a contracted position with a quern with hammered projections laid over the skull and upper torso⁷. Twenty burials were found in 1981⁹.

The older east sector, 1983 to 1986

In 1983 the mission worked on both sides of structure 100. The east sector, whose deposits lay under wall 100, was occupied before the west. Wall 284 was now traced for over 60 m, and the fallen roof of S.85 showed impressions of branches under pisé, read as evidence for a flat terrace roof¹¹. Le Brun, in the 1983 report, took the occupation to have lasted much longer than Dikaios had supposed, and thought the move west better read as a displacement than as an expansion driven by population growth, if the absence of a contemporary level in the east is confirmed¹¹.

In 1984 only the east sector was dug. Structure 100 proved to be the last of at least three successive boundary walls, and the houses there were circular, with internal diameters over 4 m, one of 4.80 m. House S. 117 had two pillars and a U-shaped notch. Three anthropomorphic pieces made of andesite pebbles lay outside houses¹². The 1986 season extended the east sector south and east, joining areas dug by Dikaios. A sounding beside S. 116 reached virgin soil through at least six architectural levels, and pollen and charred remains were sampled¹⁰. Twelve burials were excavated and five more located¹⁰.

The hilltop, the foot of the hill and the north side

In 1997 the work turned to the summit, south of the village entrance. Part of the enclosure wall had collapsed at the end of Level III, and the entrance was rebuilt as a mound with ramps. A new area at the foot of the hill produced well-built structures and limestone bowls¹³. The 1998 season refined the stratigraphy there, and in 2000 the later part of the east-sector sequence was defined and the house S148 was excavated in the west sector¹³.

In 2008 and 2009 Le Brun worked on the terraces of the north side to trace the two successive boundary walls. The earliest, found in a deep trench near the river, is a massive pisé wall faced with stone that runs parallel to the Maroni^3,14. The Department of Antiquities report for 2008 says this research resulted in a profound revision of the settlement's history, reading the later southern expansion as a rearrangement of built space and not as population growth¹⁴.

Papaconstantinou noted in 1997 that the mission's stratigraphy was exceptionally well presented but its finds not yet published¹⁵. In the 1990s the Department of Antiquities had a visitors' centre at the site, with replicas of part of the enclosure wall, an entrance and round houses^1,16.