Palaepaphos: the British Museum tomb excavations at Kouklia

Between 6 and 25 March 1899, Francis Bertram Welch and Percy Christian searched tombs at several places around Kouklia for the British Museum, and registered 27 items from the campaign¹. Constantinos Theodorides, the government superintendent, reported 22 days of excavation¹. Kiely says the team hoped to find intact Late Bronze Age tombs that had eluded the Cyprus Exploration Fund in 1888, and were disappointed in that aim¹.

Welch's report describes successive searches in the fields by the path towards Orites, in the ravine north of the threshing floor, at the south end of the plateau and on ground across a stream; the team stopped after finding mostly common or disturbed tombs¹. Kiely proposes that some of the work lay in the southern part of the Xylinos area, but stresses that Welch's descriptions are vague and can be misleading¹. No tomb inventories were kept, because the tombs were considered uninteresting and the finds common¹.

The British Museum's surviving finds run from Late Cypriot IIIB/Cypro-Geometric to Cypro-Classical, mostly in the earlier part of that range, and include Proto-White Painted wares and some Late Bronze Age material^1,2. Three terracotta statuettes of the 'Goddess with Upraised Arms' type (GR 1899,12–29.1–3), described by Kiely as Cypro-Archaic I and 36.5, 33 and 28.5 cm high, were said to come from one tomb¹. A miniature basket-handled amphora (GR 1899,12–29.25) has a painted bearded head and a four-character Cypro-Syllabic inscription, and Kiely dates it to 750–475 BC¹. The group also includes a steatite miniature bathtub (GR 1899,12–29.15) and six metal items (GR 1899,12–29.7–12) said to come from one tomb¹. Kiely argues that this is a highly selective sample, with little of the common pottery retained¹. The fate of most of the approximately 400 pottery pieces described by Theodorides is unknown¹.