Marki-Alonia: the La Trobe / Australian Cyprus Expedition excavations

The Australian Cyprus Expedition excavated about 2000 m² of a six-hectare Early and Middle Bronze Age village at Marki-Alonia, and found 33 architectural compounds in that area; the settlement was occupied for 500 to 600 years¹. David Frankel and Jennifer M. Webb date the occupation from about 2400 BC to Middle Cypriot II, about 1800 BC¹. Frankel described Marki in 1999 as by far the most extensively excavated site of the prehistoric Bronze Age in Cyprus².

Seasons at Alonia

La Trobe University's Australian Cyprus Expedition began with a preliminary survey of the Marki region in 1990³. Frankel directed the first excavation season at Marki-Alonia in late 1991 and the winter of 1991–92, and later accounts name Frankel and Webb as directors for 1991–2000^3,4. Two areas were investigated in that first season. Four rooms and an associated floor of a Middle Bronze Age habitation unit were uncovered in one, and upper deposits and wall tops were cleared over a larger area in the other. The season produced nearly 19,000 sherds, of which 2,285 diagnostic sherds (11.5%) were documented in detail^3,5. A data bank recorded size, shape, fabric texture, colour, hardness, surface treatment and decoration for every diagnostic sherd, and the pottery programme aimed to allow detailed comparison between contexts and with other settlements, and to examine the social context of ceramic production and how technology passed between potters³. Robyn Adams and Dianne Simmons of Deakin University worked on the ecological context and plant remains from 1993⁵.

The fourth and fifth seasons, in the winters of 1995–96 and 1996–97, excavated a dirt road that had divided the two parts of the Alonia excavation, which clarified the construction phases and gave a more coherent plan. In the fifth season a linked set of three rooms with one entry (units XIII, IX and X) was for the first time identified as a single house⁶.

The season of November 1998 to January 1999 was the largest to that date. A team of up to 38 students, from La Trobe, Melbourne, New England, Queensland, ANU and Monash, opened an additional 1000 m², doubling the excavated area, and one building complex was excavated more fully, giving assemblages of the earlier part of the Bronze Age². The opening was meant to give a broad basis for studying household architecture, economy, technology and culture history. The Australian Research Council was a funder, and by 1999 over 100 students from around Australia had taken part². The eighth and final season was in 2000⁷. Over the eight seasons 309,501 Bronze Age ceramic items were recovered and processed⁸.

What the village held

The lowest deposits in the southern and south-western areas held Philia pottery, animal bone and chipped stone, which the excavators read as domestic refuse washed down from an unexcavated area upslope. There were post-holes, pits and pebble-lined pot-stands but no architecture. A sealed Philia pit gave a calibrated date of 2440–2120 BC^4,6. In the northern area, hobs or pot-stands of a type known in Anatolia were identified for the first time in Cyprus⁵.

In phase B, units XIII, IX and X formed a complete EC III-MC I house of three rooms with benches, hearths, a compartmented mud-brick bin, an oven and pot-stands. Finds included a hob, abundant Red Polished pottery, limestone bowls, ground stone and a fragmentary cradle figurine built into a plaster bench^4,6. Beneath the major EC III-MC I construction, in unit LXIII, walls of an earlier building survived with Red Polished I-II ware, a plaster hearth and a pot emplacement; two intramural burials show that the dead were sometimes buried inside the settlement⁶. The apparently later southern part, with Middle Cypriot II pottery, gave two radiocarbon determinations of probably 1835–1730 BC for the last use of one building⁵.

The 2000 season exposed stratified buildings of Philia, EC I-II and EC III date, two narrow streets, small freestanding Philia buildings, pits with Philia pottery, an oven, a pithos burial found in 1999 and an Iron Age ditch 40 m long. Unit CXXI held a three-roomed EC III/MC I house over Philia remains, with a finely decorated picrolite disc⁷. Frankel and Webb's sequence has the settlement growing from a few households to a village of a maximum of about 400 inhabitants, with changes in the space available to each family unit, before the site was abandoned¹.

The Davari tombs

In 1996 the project cleared Tombs 5 and 6 at Marki-Davari to test the salvage potential of the hundreds of looted tombs in the surrounding cemeteries⁶. Tomb 6 was a shallow Philia pit tomb with much Red Polished I and White Painted IA (Philia) ware and a spiral copper or bronze earring. Tomb 5 was a looted EC III/MC I chamber tomb from which little remained⁶. A shallow circular pit tomb on the uppermost part of the ridge, cleared in 1999–2000, was looted and held many Philia Red Polished sherds, fragmentary human bone and one dentalium shell bead⁷.

Publication and the site now

Frankel and Webb published the excavations of 1990–1994 as Marki Alonia: An Early and Middle Bronze Age Town in Cyprus (SIMA CXXIII, 1996)⁹. The village stands on the slope of the Alykos River and has eroded significantly in recent years. The Department of Antiquities decided to rebury and cover the site to protect it, and asked the Cyprus Institute to document it first; in late September 2024 researchers from APAC Labs/STARC recorded it with laser scanning, terrestrial and aerial photogrammetry and GNSS, producing a high-resolution textured 3D model¹⁰.