Marion: Department of Antiquities rescue work, 1957–1967

The Department of Antiquities worked at Marion in four years between 1957 and 1967. In 1957 looting at the Peristeries cemetery, which A. H. S. Megaw said had been overlooked by archaeologists, brought it to notice. The Cyprus Museum secured a large White Painted IV amphora with bird and fish decoration, bronze bowls (two with syllabic inscriptions) and a corroded cauldron, and purchased a Black-on-Red jug with a plastic female head thought to come from the same cemetery¹.

In 1958 Chrysostomos Paraskeva conducted rescue excavations at the new-cinema site, and five Archaic to Classical tombs were excavated after a cemetery was met during levelling for a building plot in the village. One held a wooden coffin of which bronze fittings and nails survived. Finds included Attic black-glaze pottery, a gold lion-head pendant and seated terracotta figurine fragments, and Tomb 120 produced a limestone slab with a three-line Cypriot syllabic inscription^2,3. Mitford states that the stele recovered by Paraskeva is now in the Paphos District Museum, inventory RR 1350³.

In 1960 Kyriakos Nicolaou directed excavation of tombs in several Marion cemeteries and a systematic survey of the city and surrounding region, from the Limni mines to the old port at Latchi and the north coast^4,5. The oldest tomb in the east necropolis was dated to the beginning of the Bronze Age, at the end of the third millennium BCE. A large Cypro-Geometric cemetery lay east of Polis, with Archaic and Classical cemeteries farther east. Nicolaou opened seven tombs there, containing among other vessels an Attic lekythos and skyphos, and another tomb nearer the village held two iron candelabra. An Early Christian basilica was exposed north of Polis at Arsinoe, with a Byzantine church over its ruins. Ancient slag deposits were noted near the modern mines, and Karageorghis's report states that it seems certain Marion's rise was due to copper mining⁴. Sherds from looted tombs allowed a Bichrome V amphora decorated with a large fish on each side to be reconstructed^4,5.

In 1967 bulldozer work at Tipozita, a Classical cemetery that the report describes as long subject to systematic looting, exposed two partly looted tombs. One contained an Attic red-figure askos with two female heads, Attic black-glaze vessels and a polychrome jug with a bull protome; the other included an askos decorated with two geese and jugs with moulded bull protomes. The report gives Paphos Museum inventory number 1799 for the first group⁶.