Maa-Palaeokastro: the Department excavations

A wall about 4 m thick and 209 m long defended the seaward end of the promontory at Maa-Palaeokastro, and 128 m of it was exposed in 1980.^1,2 The Department of Antiquities dug the Late Bronze Age town there in eight campaigns between 1979 and 1986.^1,3

The town and its wall

Vassos Karageorghis, Director of the Department of Antiquities, directed the excavation, and Martha Demas wrote the chapter on the architecture and co-authored the final volume.^1,4 The first season found groups of modestly built houses with Myc. IIIC:1 pottery, pithos fragments, a fragmentary nude fertility-goddess idol and a Mycenaean-type bronze arrowhead.¹ The Cyclopean wall had always been visible, and the report recalls Dikaios's sounding of 1954.¹ Karageorghis hoped that five campaigns would clear most of the town.¹

The second campaign worked in the central part of the promontory and brought the cleared area to about 900 m2, with small poorly built single-floor houses and Myc. IIIC:1b pottery.² At the end of the promontory the defensive wall had rectangular bastions on its inner face and two rectangular towers at each end, and a triangular enclosure of 34 x 22.50 x 23.50 m lay inside.^1,2,5 The 1981 season cleared the enceinte, towers and bastions along their length and showed that the north gate had been blocked in the second phase; a narrower gate was built a few metres to the west.^5,6

The ashlar building and the houses

Near the north gate, the 1981 campaign uncovered a square building of 12.50 m side with an ashlar facade. Mycenaean IIIB pottery with local Cypriot pottery lay on its floor.⁵ Two crudely built houses with Myc. IIIC:1 pottery, separated by a pebble street, replaced it.⁵ Karageorghis thought the building public and probably a sanctuary, though no find confirmed a religious function.^5,6 The 1982 campaign cleared it completely and found more houses of the later period, with a pebble-paved street running through them.⁶

In 1983 two one-month seasons worked west and south of the building in Sector II. They found an ash-filled pit with Myc. IIIB pottery and a fragment of a painted bull figurine, and a rock-cut depression holding a large room with a central plaster hearth and smaller rooms to the east. These held a copper ingot fragment and a black steatite stamp seal.⁷ The report suggested that the complex had been a sanctuary in Period I, and Symons says it may have been.^7,8

The seven-week season of 1984, partly funded by the A. G. Leventis Foundation, uncovered a large complex used in both periods, with rooms off a common corridor.⁹ It produced a pithos fragment with a stamped chariot hunt, a bronze sceptre 15.9 cm high of a very rare type, Myc. IIIC skyphoi and the first Barbarian Ware jar identified in Cyprus.⁹ The central area was cleared in 1985, with work concentrated on Area II and the parts of the site south and west of it, to link it to Area I.^3,8 LH IIIC:1 sherds from the destruction layer showed that Period I continued into that period.⁸

Dating and interpretation

Karageorghis dated the foundation to about 1230 BC, destruction by fire to about 1200, and reoccupation for about 25 years before abandonment.^8,9 He read the first phase as the arrival of Aegean refugees with Anatolian adventurers (the "Sea Peoples") and the second as Achaean settlers from the Peloponnese and/or the Dodecanese.^6,9 He stressed that the short occupation made the site's architecture and pottery useful chronological markers for Enkomi and Kition.⁵ In 1986 Myc. IIIC pottery was shown to have been in use before the violent destruction of the settlement.³

The Chalcolithic levels

Cavities cut in the rock in the central area, which Karageorghis thought were for the burial of early settlers, produced pottery and human and animal bones in 1980. They were provisionally considered possibly Chalcolithic, though only two stone axes of that date had been found at Maa.² A Red-on-White Chalcolithic ash deposit and a semi-circular rough stone structure followed in 1983.⁷

The eighth campaign, in 1986, lasted four weeks, with a small team under Gordon Thomas of the University of Edinburgh, and its main aim was the Chalcolithic occupation.³ The excavators chose a location outside the main Late Bronze Age deposits, in the hope that early levels survived, and dug 112 m2 to bedrock plus 72 m2 to the west.³ They found a circular timber structure of seven postholes in the bedrock (reconstructed diameter 6.50 m), two pits, and a circular rock-cut groove with 26 stake-holes (unit 37).³ Two apparently funerary pits held no burial: unit 3, a small pit with a step before the entry to a small chamber, which had no primary burial, and unit 67, up to 1.62 m deep, which had no human remains and which the report compares to the largest chamber tombs at Mosphilia.³

The final publication is Karageorghis and Demas, Excavations at Maa-Palaeokastro 1979–1986 (Nicosia, Department of Antiquities, 1988), which follows a preliminary report on the seasons from 1979 to 1982 by Karageorghis, Demas and Kling.^10,11