Phlamoudhi: the Columbia University Expedition

At Melissa, a plateau near the north coast, Columbia University's team found a settlement that Smith dates as occupied continuously from Middle Cypriot III to the end of Late Cypriot IIC, and a pit holding the remains of twenty pithoi with olives and charred wood^1,2. The settlement was located by a survey in 1971, in a campaign that had begun a year earlier on the hill of Vounari, two kilometres to the east^3,4.

Porada's expedition

Edith Porada directed the expedition for Columbia University, with Sarandis Symeonoglou as field director, from 1970 to 1973^4,5. Porada wanted to give her students excavation experience while investigating Middle Bronze Age connections between the Aegean, Cyprus and the Near East, and she hoped in particular to find cylinder seals⁵. The students supervised excavation done by local villagers, and the work at Vounari used triangular trenches fitted to the steep ground⁶. Finds were washed, counted and processed by locus in the village schoolhouse, where the team also set up a simple flotation system⁶. Selma Al-Radi and Samuel Paley worked on Vounari and its stratigraphy from 1971⁶.

The campaign of 10 August to 6 September 1970 concentrated on Vounari. Smith reports that the team had taken the hill for a small Bronze Age fortification, following Catling's report, until the walls at its base proved to be recent terracing¹. Trenches on the hill exposed collapsed architecture and a destruction deposit, Middle Bronze Age walls and terrace works, Late Bronze Age material, and two statues near a small altar. The excavators proposed a rustic sanctuary of Archaic to Hellenistic date³.

Finding Melissa

In 1971 Symeonoglou carried out a systematic survey to locate a Bronze Age settlement. It recorded eleven major settlements, ten smaller settlements, four possible sanctuary sites and at least ten cemeteries⁴. Trial trenches at Sapilou showed a Hellenistic-Roman site, while those at Melissa found Late Cypriot I architecture⁷. A sounding there exposed a large building with two construction phases, dated by sealed pottery to Late Cypriot IA and IB⁴. In Symeonoglou's 1975 account these correspond to c. 1525 BC for construction and c. 1450 BC for renovation⁷.

In 1972 the team traced retaining walls A, B and C at Vounari and described a major monument with foundations assigned to Late Cypriot IA and repairs to Late Cypriot IB. At Melissa it uncovered the east end of the earlier building and a later one with rooms, courts, a gypsum floor and a paved court, with Mycenaean IIIB pottery, slag, ivory and copper among the finds⁸. In 1973 Vounari's excavation was described as practically finished, and work at Melissa centred on a large Late Cypriot IIB to C building². The excavators proposed that the pit of twenty pithoi was an olive-oil cellar. The building also yielded a hematite cylinder seal, carnelian beads, small tools, gold leaf and ivory, and appeared to have been burnt and emptied².

Reading the records again

The team had expected a season in 1974, but the political situation, the Turkish invasion of that year, made it impossible; the site lies in the area occupied by Turkey since 1974 and has been abandoned since then¹. Later study rests on the notebooks, photographs, plans and objects from the original work¹. Smith counts sixteen narrative notebooks with sketch plans for Melissa, more than 750 black-and-white photographs, about 250 colour slides and twenty section drawings¹.

The 1971 season report treated Vounari as a possible Bronze Age sanctuary or fortress, called the sanctuary reading the most probable though not certain, and identified the Iron Age remains as a sanctuary⁴. Symeonoglou held to the sanctuary interpretation, as did Merrillees⁹. Mara T. Horowitz, whose restudy appears in the 2008 volume, argues that Bronze Age Vounari had economic and administrative functions as well as possible ritual activity¹. As Smith reports it, Horowitz rejects identifying the hill as a sanctuary or cult place⁵. She describes a monumental stone platform of about 16 by 16 m enclosing the upper hill, later given buttresses, terraces on the north slope and a circuit wall, Wall A, with a north entrance¹. She dates the last use to the first part of Late Cypriot IIA, with no destruction or evident cause for abandonment; Merrillees had put the end at the close of Late Cypriot IB or the very start of Late Cypriot II^1,10.

Joanna S. Smith, who did not take part in the fieldwork, began the restudy and publication in 2000⁵. At Melissa she reconstructs seven Bronze Age building phases plus a pre-architectural phase, where the team's original estimate was two, and describes destruction by earthquake and fire in the 13th century BCE¹. Cypro-Archaic and Cypro-Classical builders later reused parts of the Bronze Age walls, and a small church of Panagia Melissa stands at the locality¹.

Where the finds went

The expedition shipped its notes, photographs and most ceramic finds to New York for study at Columbia, under an export permit that, Smith reports, Vassos Karageorghis, then director of the Department of Antiquities, had granted Porada^1,5. Gold, ivory, figural terracottas and limestone sculpture were housed in the Cyprus Museum¹. Some stone tools and fragments of large pithoi stored in the village schoolhouse were later lost, though Smith reports that the majority of the finds survive at Columbia and in the Cyprus Museum⁵. Selma M. S. Al-Radi published Vounari in 1983 as Phlamoudhi Vounari: A Sanctuary Site in Cyprus, and Views from Phlamoudhi, Cyprus (2008) presents the Melissa study and Horowitz's restudy^1,11.