Kourion: the University of Arizona excavation of the Earthquake House

At Kourion the University of Arizona uncovered a house whose rooms held a tethered equid, a child's remains, a marble tabletop and a copper-alloy lampstand with its lamp^1,2. David Soren directed the work for the University of Arizona from 1984 to 1987, with Thomas Davis as field director for the first two seasons^3,4.

Reopening Trench III

Soren says the 1984 work was undertaken at the invitation of Vassos Karageorghis, Director of Antiquities of Cyprus, and that permission to dig was granted². He planned the excavation to test his hypothesis about the date of the earthquake that destroyed Kourion, using the reopened trench of the Penn mission and its undisturbed destruction deposits^1,2. The Institute for Laboratory Science, Ventura, California, was a funder².

The first campaign, in June 1984, partly excavated a house and its adjoining courtyard³. Costello gives the area opened as 42.38 m2¹. In Room Two Soren recorded an adult horse or mule tethered by an iron chain to a heavy stone trough, the remains of a child, fragments of a Cycladic marble tabletop reported as 70 cm in diameter, and a copper-alloy lampstand with its lamp². His 1985 preliminary article called Room Two a courtyard; the book he wrote with James describes it as a hastily improvised stable^2,5. The child, aged nine or ten and probably a girl in Karageorghis's annual notice, was taken to Tucson after cleaning and stabilization^2,3. Soren reported 365 copper-alloy coins from the 1984 excavation².

The house and the building to its north

In 1985 the excavation expanded northwest of the first trench and then west of Room Three, exposing Rooms Six and Seven, which Soren described as containing numerous vessels and glassware⁵. After the first season the method changed from baulks and debris units to open excavation organized by architectural spaces, on a 10 by 10 m grid divided into 5 by 5 m squares, with sieving and flotation sampling; computer recording and mapping began in 1985^1,5.

In 1986 work at the north end of the house exposed a kitchen with the remains of a mud-brick oven, a large pithos, amphorae, pottery and a bronze jug, and a basin where a 69-bead necklace of 63 coral beads, five amber beads and one probably of jet lay with fish bones and a bracelet. An open eastern space was interpreted as a garden, yard or open area⁶. Three skeletons came from Room 20: a young woman, an infant and a man, which brought the reported total of human skeletons in the house to seven⁶. The 1987 notice gives the woman's age as 19, the child's as eighteen months and the man's as over 25⁷.

The final season, 1987, completed the investigation of the Room 20 skeletons and opened an area north of the house, where a monumental building was partly excavated. Its cornices, consoles and painted architectural elements have parallels dated to the late first to mid second century CE. Rooms 23, 28 and 30 held material including more than 200 bone bobbins, lead weights, ovens and lamps, and the report suggests that Rooms 28 and 30 may have been shops or workshops⁷. In collaboration with the Department of Antiquities, the mission restored a room as an Earthquake Museum⁷.

Dating the destruction

Soren proposed that the destruction was the earthquake of 21 July 365 CE, drawing in part on the coin evidence and comparison with ancient accounts^2,3. Costello argues that it can only be placed in the later fourth century, possibly around AD 370–380¹. Costello's analysis also argues that at least two, perhaps three, residential groups may have occupied the house¹.

Finds were processed and conserved at the Kourion Museum in Episkopi^1,5. Costello reports that most of the Earthquake House assemblage is in the Kourion Museum storerooms, with a small number of objects in the Cyprus Archaeological Museum¹. Costello says the first three seasons were published as preliminary reports in RDAC and that no volume was produced for the acropolis to accompany the one on the Apollo sanctuary; he calls Soren and James's Kourion: The Search for a Lost Roman City (1988) the only treatment of the whole excavation and a popular work lacking some basic scholarly apparatus¹.