Ayia Paraskevi, Nicosia: the Cyprus Exploration Fund (1894)

In 1894 John Linton Myres opened fourteen tombs on the northern edge of the plateau at Ayia Paraskevi near Nicosia, west of the Larnaka road, for the Cyprus Exploration Fund. The work was one of five excavations in his 1894 programme, which he described as intended principally to test theories current in Cypriote archaeology. At Ayia Paraskevi he saw the cemetery as a way to become acquainted with the Bronze Age of Cyprus and to verify earlier observations, in connection with the reorganisation of the Cyprus Museum. He stated that the part of the cemetery he investigated had been nearly exhausted by Ohnefalsch-Richter's excavations of 1883 and 1884¹.

Myres classified the necropolis as Bronze Age. He distinguished tomb groups with red polished ware alone from groups that also had black slip ware, painted wares and other fabrics, and noted that copper implements were more frequent in the second kind¹. Tomb 10, a collapsed natural cave, held a large range of pottery fabrics, bronze and silver objects, and gold mounts (C.M. 4502) that Myres thought almost certainly the setting of a cylindrical seal, though the seal was not found; a figurine of fine clay in what he called the rudest known Cypriote fabric lay near them¹. Tomb 14, a natural cave with an enlarged entrance and a bath-shaped dromos, yielded red and painted ware and horse teeth that Myres said had been used as burnishers, probably in making fine red ware¹. Tomb 12 was a surface grave of Hellenistic or Graeco-Roman date, intrusive in the cemetery, with three unpainted vessels (C.M. 2159–61)¹.

Myres records the Tomb 10 group and the Tomb 12 vessels as going to the Cyprus Museum, and the finds from Tombs 1 and 11 as going to the Ashmolean Museum. He published the account in 1897 as "Excavations in Cyprus in 1894" in the Journal of Hellenic Studies¹.