Lefkoniko: Myres's excavation for the Cyprus Museum

At Lefkoniko in 1913, John Linton Myres excavated a sanctuary whose Deposit Chamber, about 3.5 m across, was packed to a depth of about 0.50 m with stone statuettes and sculpture fragments¹. The work was done for the Cyprus Museum² and began on 1 October, after a landowner found masonry, large statues and a bronze object; Myres considered examination urgent to anticipate further discoveries¹. Menelaos Markides, Keeper of the Cyprus Museum, prepared the detailed inventory that Myres's report summarizes¹. Myres extended two recent searchpits into a broad north-south trench and then worked outward to east and west, replacing excavated earth in the original trench; he reports that the plan generally worked well¹. A four-day sounding in a plot about 140 m south of the sanctuary recorded wall footings, floors and a plaster-lined cistern, but no coherent plan, and the cistern yielded late unpainted sherds that Myres called Hellenistic or Graeco-Roman¹.

The sanctuary had statue bases, rubble walls, floor remains and later masonry, but Myres reports that the remains were heavily disturbed and that he could trace only limited sequences of undisturbed deposits¹. Myres recorded more than thirty rough stone statue bases, which he took as showing that life-size statues were sometimes dedicated¹. Small bronze figures and four bronze cows were found among the stone figures near the southeast corner of the chamber¹. Myres dated the chamber's contents from the seventh century BCE to the third or fourth century CE and read the deposit as assembled in one operation at the end of the sanctuary's use¹. Myres reconstructed the earliest use of the sanctuary as Early Iron Age, with rough hand-modelled terracottas followed around the beginning of the seventh century BCE by stone figures¹. A later account credits the excavation with almost 600 pieces of limestone sculpture³. Myres published a summary in the Annual of the British School at Athens in 1945; the sculpture catalogue there abridges Markides's inventory¹. A limestone seated temple-boy statuette holding a bird, Lefkoniko no. 459, is in the Cyprus Museum, Nicosia, as D 242⁴.