Morphou-Toumba tou Skourou: the Harvard-MFA Boston expedition

At Toumba tou Skourou, a mound just north of Morphou, three campaigns between 1971 and 1973 exposed a stone building with communicating plaster-lined basins that the excavators considered most likely a clay-washing installation, three pithos fragments with incised Cypro-Minoan writing, and six chamber tombs.^1,2

The mound and its first reading

Emily T. Vermeule directed the expedition of Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which sponsored the work at Morphou-Toumba tou Skourou.^3,4 The excavators described the site as near the Ovgos River.⁵ The 1971 annual report says it had been disturbed by tomb robbers and seriously damaged by mechanical levelling before the land could be expropriated.³ The 1972 report noted that the land held by the Department of Antiquities was small compared with the site, doubted that a long excavation was feasible, and expected one or two more years of work.¹

In 1971 the expedition exposed parallel east-west red-stone walls in herringbone construction, read in the first report as fortifications of the end of Middle Cypriot III and beginning of Late Cypriot I. It also found a mudbrick platform about four metres above the surrounding town, with successive workshop floors, fire pits, bellows fragments, crucibles and slag, and proposed copper working.³ The 1972 season, 3 July to 2 September, included the cleaning of a bulldozer cut through the mound.¹ It revised the first reading: the walls and fills to the west were understood as later than, and resting against, the brick mound, not as an earlier fort.¹ Vermeule's 1976 interim account later cautioned that the mound did not seem to have had an important metal-working industry and described the slag as ceramic.⁵

Basins, storage building and tombs

The 1972 work recorded early pottery floors and a stone building of about 14.50 by 6 metres with communicating plaster-lined basins and buried storage jars. The excavators offered several possible uses, among them water storage, wine-making, copper-sulphate separation and washing clay for pottery, which they considered the most likely.¹ In 1973 they still regarded a clay-washing installation as possible but acknowledged that the function was unresolved.² A later building beside the mound held pithoi in rows and groups, associated with at least four wells; the excavators called it a storehouse, storage building or drying place and described its use as shortly before 1200 BCE.¹ The three pithos fragments from 1973 carry deeply incised Cypro-Minoan writing, and there are a second graffito and about a dozen potters' marks. The excavators noted evidence of writing but no surviving archive deposit.²

The first season's tomb, later called Tomb 1, was a circular shaft with fourteen wall niches for infants or young children and three chambers cut beneath the floor for adults. The 1971 report lists about 350 vases, cylinder seals, bronze objects, scarabs, beads and gold rivets, with seven Minoan LM IA vessel fragments and Palestinian Bichrome pottery. In 1973 the excavators gave a total of 630 objects, including 522 vases, for the same tomb.^1,3

In 1972 the team excavated Tombs 2 to 4. Tomb 2 had four chambers and more than one burial phase, with ostrich eggs, ivory objects, pottery and a lapis lazuli cylinder seal with gold caps. Tomb 3 was described as intact, with one chamber holding an adult man, a woman and a child, and a niche for two children in the dromos. Tomb 4 had one chamber, multiple burials and niches in the dromos. The excavators considered Tombs 3 and 4 early Late Cypriot I.¹ The date of the later burial in Tomb 2 is reported two ways: the excavation account associates the assemblage with the Amarna period, about 1350 BCE, while Nicolaou's notice describes a Mycenaean girl who died about 1300 BCE.^1,6

The 1973 campaign, which the annual report calls the last, was directed by Vermeule with Cornelius C. Vermeule III as co-director.² The team located two new tombs after a mechanical digger removed sand at the edge of the orange grove.² Tombs 5 and 6 each had three chambers, and the excavators dated them to the beginning of the Late Bronze Age, about 1600 to 1550 BCE. The report records six to eight skeletons per chamber and around 50 to 80 objects in each tomb, including Palestinian imports and a Tell el-Yahudiyeh juglet.² The 1973 report placed the city's foundation about 1600 BCE, and Vermeule's 1976 account proposed abandonment about 1220 BCE, with thermoluminescence dates of about 1250 to 1210 BCE or 1273 to 1207 BCE for the latest Bronze Age pottery.^2,5

Reading the site, and what became of the finds

The excavators interpreted the site as the industrial or potters' quarter of a larger town and considered pottery production the strongest explanation for the workshop debris and the basin installation.² Gagné later argued that it was a production centre for White Painted and other wares.⁷ Reviewing the final volume, Karageorghis said that the ceramic-centre hypothesis for the wider region merited further testing, including clay analyses, and that the stratigraphy was hard to reconstruct because floors and layers were not numbered and the terms "early" and "later" were too imprecise for correlation across the site.⁸

Fieldwork ended with the 1973 campaign. Karageorghis writes that the expedition was suddenly terminated by the invasion of Cyprus in 1974⁸. After the Turkish invasion of 1974 the site, in the area occupied by Turkey, and the excavation materials were inaccessible to the excavators; later accounts report damage to the site and loss or disruption of excavated material.^8,9 Merrillees quotes the expedition's Fourth Informal Report of November 1975: the clinic where sherds were stored had been looted and the stratified sherd bags dumped in a mine-field.¹⁰ Karageorghis notes that a large number of objects in the final volume are marked as in the Cyprus Museum, and that vases stolen from the depot, still bearing the mission's inventory numbers, reached the Museum of the University of Virginia and were returned to the Department of Antiquities.⁸ Herscher reports that 240 objects had been reported missing from the expedition storerooms and that two pots from the site arrived at the Cypriot Embassy in Washington.¹¹

The final excavation volume, by Vermeule and F. Z. Wolsky, appeared in 1990 as Toumba tou Skourou, a Bronze Age Potter's Quarter on Morphou Bay in Cyprus.⁸