Kourion: the Penn Museum excavations (Curium Expedition)

In 1952 George H. McFadden relocated and re-excavated Tomb 40 in the Kaloriziki necropolis at Kourion, a tomb looted in 1903; he recovered an undisturbed group from its rock-cut bench and a bronze urn holding cremated remains¹. The rim and handles of the urn correspond to objects confiscated in 1903 together with a gold-and-enamel sceptre, now in the Cyprus Museum¹. The tomb was one of many places worked between 1934 and 1954 by the expedition of the Penn Museum².

Hill, McFadden and Daniel

The University of Pennsylvania Museum's expedition worked at Kourion (Curium) from 1934 to 1954, except 1942 through 1946, according to Davis². In Daniel's reports Bert Hodge Hill is the director and George H. McFadden and John Franklin Daniel each took charge of a section³. Costello calls Hill the titular director and says he employed the trench-and-peel method; Davis and Costello call McFadden chief excavator and financial backer, and Megaw's annual notice for 1953 calls McFadden Assistant Field Director^2,4,5. Davis sees the expedition as essentially McFadden's personal commitment, since the University Museum's commitment to Cyprus was primarily his².

The stated aim was to trace the history of Kourion across the different sites it occupied, from its earliest history to the end of Roman rule². Costello notes that one of the main goals was to recover artistically significant objects for the University Museum collections, so the focus was on locating and excavating public spaces where such works were likely to be found, and that Hill used trench-and-peel to expose these areas quickly. He describes the procedures Daniel used to document the context of artifacts in his trenches as very crude⁴.

The first seasons, 1934 to 1941

The first season ran from May to August 1934. Twelve tombs were excavated in Kaloriziki field, with McFadden supervising Tombs 18 and 29³. Daniel opened Trench III on the acropolis on 29 May, and his first trial trench that year found the main basilica⁴. In the trench he uncovered walls that he believed belonged to three structures, Houses 1 to 3, with pots, bronze vessels, coins and lamps apparently in place at destruction. In House 1, Room 1 he found two skeletons among objects and concluded that they were not a burial; seeing no sign of fire, he thought an earthquake the likely cause⁴. Daniel later published Kaloriziki Tombs 25 and 26, which included Late Cypriot III burials³.

In 1935 McFadden found the Archaic Precinct at the sanctuary of Apollo Hylates and relocated Cesnola's Ayia Anna ravine, where he found a confused mass of broken statuary, stone blocks and figurines without stratification, probably a temple dump of the sanctuary⁶. In 1936 he found the Votive Deposit, an enclosed area roughly 4 m across tightly packed with broken figurines and a few other objects, and excavated it in four sections⁶. The Archaic Precinct was dug in plotted two-metre squares, with the upper and lower earth separated⁶.

In spring 1937 Daniel dug the Late Bronze Age settlement at Episkopi-Bamboula after ten trial trenches, investigating part of the fortification wall and two groups of dwellings⁷. He reported four pots and seven sherds with incised inscriptions and read three signs as Kuri; he argued that the name connected the settlement with Kourion⁷. From 1940 to 1941 the expedition sank 95 pits at the Ayios Ermoyenis necropolis; nine disclosed tombs with burials and grave goods, and seven disclosed plain monolithic Roman sarcophagi⁸. Virginia Grace supervised work on Tombs 1 and 9. In 1946 John Howard Young and Suzanne Halstead Young, with McFadden's permission, made a final investigation of the Votive Deposit area⁶.

The last years

De C. Fales completed investigations of the theatre and adjoining baths in 1949; the theatre was first built in the third century BC, and coins placed the baths probably in the early fifth century AD⁹. In 1950 McFadden cleared the main temple at Apollo Hylates, identifying a later doubled arrangement and foundations of an earlier building below⁹. In 1952 the expedition partly excavated a bath at the western entrance with mosaics of Achilles and Ganymede, and J. S. Last continued his study of the water system¹⁰.

McFadden died in a sailing accident in April 1953 while Last's excavation of the water distribution system was in progress. New staff arrived in September but excavation was not resumed on a considerable scale. In November D. H. Cox excavated a three-room metal-working establishment on the acropolis, possibly a mint, which the annual report dated to the fifth century AD⁵. In 1954, under G. Roger Edwards, the expedition wound up its work on most sites; R. Stillwell made supplementary investigations at the theatre and Jack L. Benson worked at Bamboula and studied Daniel's material¹¹. The finds were divided, and the Cyprus Museum received notable additions to many of its sections¹¹.

Publication and finds

Costello writes that the expedition exposed major monuments and produced important excavation material, but that no overall final publication was completed; he attributes this in part to the deaths of Daniel and McFadden, and notes that the excavation notebooks often do not document basic stratigraphic relationships. He holds that after McFadden's death Pennsylvania abandoned the excavations with many structures only partly excavated, and that the work's lasting result was observations such as the apparent late 4th-century AD earthquake destruction⁴. The basilica was cleared only to its eastern end when work ceased⁴.

Results appeared in reports on individual areas: the Ayios Ermoyenis tomb by McFadden in 1946, Tomb 40 by McFadden and Sjöqvist in 1954, the terracotta figurines by the Youngs in 1955, and the theatre by Stillwell in 1961^1,6,8,12. Benson published the Bamboula necropolis and the finds Daniel excavated in 1972 and the Kaloriziki necropolis in 1973, and Weinberg the architecture of Bamboula in 1983^13,14,15. Daniel's field notebooks are preserved in the Penn Museum archive⁴. McFadden's Episkopi house, the excavation headquarters and workrooms, was donated by his family to the Department of Antiquities after his death and became the Kourion Museum².