Palaepaphos Urban Landscape Project (PULP)

At Laona, a mound about 100 x 60 x 10 m, estimated at 13,700 cubic m of soil sediments, covers a mudbrick rampart five metres wide that was built between parallel stone walls¹. The Palaepaphos Urban Landscape Project (PULP) of the University of Cyprus set out to define the urban structure of Palaepaphos across the 2nd and 1st millennia BC, from the Late Bronze Age to the end of the Paphian kingdom².

Marchello, 2006 to 2008

Maria Iacovou directed the project from 2006². Small, targeted excavations supplemented geophysical survey (resistivity, magnetic and ground-penetrating radar), and the geophysical maps were registered to a GIS². Pavlos Flourentzos, the Director of Antiquities, issued the Marchello permit in 2006 and renewed it each year². The first field targets were Plots 147 and 110 at Marchello, chosen for the degree of danger from development and tested in an exploratory season in 2006². A companion Palaepaphos Pilot Project, funded by the University from 2007 to 2010, sought a framework for managing archaeological landscapes under development pressure². Its geophysical survey was conducted in October 2007².

Anna Satraki was assistant director from 2007 and Athos Agapiou managed the GIS programme². Apostolos Sarris of IMS-FORTH carried out the geophysics, and Susan Sherratt analysed the pottery².

The full-scale campaign of 2007 exposed 52 m of the stone foundation of the north-west arm of the rampart, with a 70 cm inner retaining wall, a rubble-and-lime core and a boulder outer face. It also found a second gate of bossed ashlar blocks about 55 m from the dog-leg gate². The wall's construction had disturbed a line of Late Cypriot chamber tombs used to the end of the 12th century BC; two complete White Painted Wheelmade III vases and a gold pomegranate bead came from a tomb chamber inside the wall². The Department of Antiquities report for 2008 records 40 m of the foundation of an Iron Age defensive system, 3.5 m thick, and an ashlar gate protected by a bastion^2,3.

Iacovou reads the Marchello defences as a royal work of exceptional scale, so far unique in Iron Age Cyprus, probably ended by violence around the beginning of the 5th century BC^2,4.

The Hadjiabdoulla citadel

Excavation at Hadjiabdoulla began in 2009⁵. On the north side of the citadel terrace the team made the unexpected discovery in 2014 and 2015 of the West Complex, a stone-built edifice preserved to almost 2 m along 65 m of the outside of the parapet wall^4,5. It held storage and processing units, drains, mill-stones, hearths and industrial installations, of which 290 sq m had been exposed by 2019⁴. Iacovou reads it as a non-residential investment of the fifth-century kings of Paphos⁴. Unit 2 was found filled with 430 kg of purple shells, the residue of purple-dye production⁶. The latest imported amphorae date to about 100 BC⁴.

From 2016 the excavation slowed to a whole-deposit archaeo-environmental programme, with each unit recorded finely and samples taken beneath collapsed roofs⁵. In the summer of 2019 the annual campaign recovered an inscribed sherd outside Unit 5 of the West Complex: an administrative ostrakon of 4.8 x 4.3 cm, with three lines in the Paphian Cypriot syllabary (inventory MAA2019.016)⁶. Iacovou and Artemis Karnava date it to roughly 325 to 309 BC from sign forms comparable with Nikokles-period inscriptions⁶.

Iacovou dates the Hadjiabdoulla complexes to about 500 BC and holds that the plateau was the administrative citadel of Paphos for about two hundred years from then⁴. She sees the complex as gradually abandoned before the late 2nd century BC⁵. Drafted ashlar blocks in situ beneath the south wall of the palace, and Late Cypriot wares from a short sounding south of it, Iacovou reads as a building of the 13th to 12th century BC⁴. Trezigny doubts that the towers at Paphos are securely attested as internal towers, in answer to Iacovou's reading of the fortifications⁷.

The Laona rampart and tumulus

Geological work confirmed in 2011 that the Laona mound was man-made, and its investigation began in 2012^1,8. The mound was built by consecutive dumping of marl and red clay layers. A stone "pseudo-grave" in its southern half proved to be a shell filled with worked marl, without interior space or contents¹. The mound was studied with ground-penetrating radar and 3D electrical resistivity tomography, and 34 mudbrick samples from the excavated east side of the rampart were analysed^1,8. Marta Lorenzon studied the earthen architecture from 2016 to 2019, and Jacopo Tabolli worked on the north side⁸.

Beneath the mound, the rampart has two facing staircases on its east side, founded at 107.20 m above sea level, and 160 m of its east and north sides had been exposed by 2022¹. Sherds of the 6th to 5th century BC transitional phase in the foundation trenches of the staircases date the rampart; Iacovou places the fortress at about 500 BC and the tumulus in the later 4th or 3rd century BC^1,4. In 2022 a third staircase turned up near the summit, and the rampart was seen to turn north-west down the north side¹.

The project also had a field laboratory in premises of the Department of Antiquities at Kouklia, and the A.G. Leventis Foundation is recorded as a funder⁴. The 2024 campaign lasted five weeks in its first phase, with work on the Laona tumulus and east wall, a defensive tower base on the north side of the palace, and reused blocks bearing ship graffiti on the outer face of the Laona wall; Late Bronze Age pottery lay under the Cypro-Classical fortification⁹. Further seasons on the towers and walls of the acropolis fortification took place in spring and autumn 2025¹⁰.