Nea Paphos: the Paphos Agora Project (Jagiellonian University)

Under the Roman Agora of Nea Paphos, the Paphos Agora Project found Hellenistic structures, among them the stylobates of the East and South Porticos, which Ewdoksia Papuci-Władyka and the project team describe as the basic markers of the ancient city centre¹. She obtained the first excavation licence for the Agora from Maria Hadjicosti, Director of the Department of Antiquities, in 2010, and work began in 2011¹. It was a Jagiellonian University mission, set up after she left the Polish mission, and it served as compulsory field training for the university's archaeology students¹. The team concentrated on the East Portico, the centre of the square, the south entrance and the south-east corner².

The first season, in 2011, opened two trenches, one in the central Agora and one in the east portico³. By 2013 the rooms east of the portico, mostly early Roman shops, numbered fifteen⁴. In 2014 Room 13 proved to be a well, hewn in bedrock and excavated to 7 m, with a closed late Hellenistic deposit^1,5. The project report dates the deposit to the late 2nd to mid-1st century BC⁵, and the authors write that the well's fill contributed largely to changing earlier assumptions on the date of the East Portico stylobate, S.100¹. The 2014 team also proposed that a feature earlier called an altar was part of a large east-west temple, probably Hellenistic⁵.

In 2016 a hoard of Trajan bronzes and six surgical instruments from Trench II pointed to a second-century AD date for the portico, and Room 31 in Trench IV yielded a probable furnace, crucibles and production waste that the team read as a bronze-casting workshop⁶. In 2018 the team revised the size of the Agora to about 160 m per side⁷. The trial trenches of 2019, north of the Agora, found channels, street surfaces and several burials cut into earlier structures; the northern edge of the porticos was not found⁸.

From 2015 the team added a non-invasive survey of the entire ancient city area, the Archaeological Park, which covers about 75 hectares^1,2. Coins and metal objects were conserved at the District Archaeological Museum in Paphos^6,9. The first results for 2011 to 2015 appeared in 2020 as Paphos Agora Project (PAP) Volume 1, edited by Papuci-Władyka¹. In 2019 the mission was joined with the Warsaw one in MA-P⁸.