Kourion: the Sotira Archaeological Project survey of the Kourion chora

In 1997 the Sotira Archaeological Project surveyed the land behind Kourion and registered 22 sites, mostly small farmsteads that were active on ceramic evidence until the Arab raids of about AD 649.¹

The survey was directed by Stuart Swiny, with C. Mavromatis listed beside him as director in Andreou's table, and lasted a single six-week season.^1,2 Costello describes it as the first large-scale pedestrian survey of the Kourion chora, covering about 154 km2 between the Kouris valley in the east and Paramali in the west.¹ It set out to understand how the land around Kourion was organised and how it contributed to the city's economic development.¹ Andreou records an attempt to create a palaeo-environmental reference collection.² Costello puts it after a smaller survey around the Kourion acropolis and Yerokarka in 1980, which he calls the first systematic survey of the area.¹

Costello reports little development of the hinterland in early periods, which he calls perhaps the most significant finding of the survey, with exploitation of the countryside peaking in the Roman and especially Late Roman period and declining after the mid-seventh century AD.¹ Kingsnorth, writing in the volume on Sotira Kaminoudhia, says the survey found no exposed chert source for prehistoric knappers except one extremely unlikely one.³ The results appeared as Swiny and Mavromatis's "Land behind Kourion" in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus for 2000.⁴ Mavromatis's 2011 Birmingham thesis states that most of the loci the project recorded can be read as estate centres or farmsteads, and uses them to study Late Antique landscapes in Kourion's hinterland.⁵ The survey material is stored with the Episkopi survey material.²