Kourion: the Kourion Mapping Project on the acropolis

The Kourion Mapping Project produced stone-by-stone drawings of the Earthquake House, the House of Achilles and the Apsed Triclinium House, the last two never drawn in detail before, and a GPS and EDM survey of the acropolis of Kourion¹. Danielle A. Parks was overall director. She conceived it so that her Amathous Gate Cemetery project could place the cemetery in relation to the acropolis and its civic, religious and domestic buildings, and she judged many published maps of the acropolis out of date. Dr Pavlos Flourentzos, Director of the Department of Antiquities, granted the permits. Funding came from Brock University, the University of Glasgow, the University at Buffalo, ASOR and the Western Sovereign Base Area Archaeological Society, among others¹.

Michael Given directed the short first season of 2005 in the field, assisted by D. Matthew Buell. The architect's plan of the Earthquake House was drawn at 1:50, and GPS contouring began but quadrants one and four were not finished¹. Luke Sollars directed in 2006. The aim of the 2006 and 2007 seasons was to return to the problem areas and take contour points at 5 m intervals¹. Buell and Christopher Mavromatis directed the third season, which the introduction places in August 2007 and a footnote in 2008, under the aegis of CAARI. Brian Hammer, project architect, updated the Department's plan of the House of Eustolios and drew walls, mosaics, cisterns and wells found in pedestrian survey¹.

Each year the team split into units for architectural drawing, GPS survey and total station survey. The drawings were made with tapes between fixed survey points, accurate internally to 0.01 m, then inked on mylar, digitised and redrawn in AutoCAD for the GIS. GPS used a Trimble GeoXT data logger with about 0.6 m horizontal error, and a Leica TPS700 EDM was the main instrument in all three seasons¹.

The survey recorded a ridge of casemate wall about 120 m long in the northwest sector as feature 033¹. An appendix catalogues unexcavated features running to at least F052, among them F049, a possible rock-cut tomb with at least two chambers¹. Buell, Mavromatis and Parks published the work in RDAC in 2009, with a preliminary study of Kourion's late antique urban space, and dedicated it to the memory of Parks (1965 to 2007)¹.