Politiko-Phorades: excavation of the Late Cypriot smelting workshop

A Late Cypriot copper-smelting workshop built beside a creek yielded more than 20,000 pieces of slag weighing 3.5 tons, together with large furnace remains and tuyères, at Politiko-Phorades. The metalworkers had built an artificial cobble bank in the channel^1,2. A. Bernard Knapp and Vasiliki Kassianidou co-directed the work for the University of Glasgow and the University of Cyprus, with Michael Donnelly named as field director in the 2001 report^1,2,3. The site was found in 1996 during the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project, and excavation followed in 1997, 1998 and 2000^1,2,3.

A geomagnetic survey preceded the 1997 season, in which three areas were excavated. The team identified a slag heap dumped in an old channel of the Kouphos River, with over 2,000 kg of copper slag and about 20 near-complete tuyères⁴. In 1998 they continued on the heap and the cobble bank, tested the surviving creek bank, looked for working floors and examined a large boulder³. The excavators report that digging was completed in summer 2000¹. North of the heap they found a large number of almost complete tuyères and a stone-lined pit holding tuyère fragments, which they suggest might be a tapping pit or other installation¹.

Knapp, Kassianidou and Donnelly describe the slag as plano-convex or planocave cakes, and read its chemistry, with a piece of matte recovered in 1998, as evidence for primary copper-sulphide smelting¹. The site yielded more than 6,000 furnace fragments and more than 600 tuyère fragments, about 50 of them nearly complete; four double tuyères were a type the excavators described as previously unknown on Cyprus^1,5.

The same authors describe Phorades as a small copper-smelting workshop and as the earliest primary smelting workshop excavated on Cyprus, and say the pottery points to the earliest phase of the Late Bronze Age, about 1600 BC¹. The 1998 report records a small assemblage of LC I to early LC II pottery, including White Slip I, Base-Ring and Red Lustrous wares³. Radiocarbon results diverge: OxA-7013 calibrates to the 12th to 10th centuries BC, and OxA 8521, on charcoal from a furnace fragment, to 1680 to 1410 BC at 95% confidence³. The excavators estimate that the site would have produced something on the order of 650 pounds of copper, while Steel's 2003 summary gives around 300 kg^1,2. A 2007 study by Hein, Kilikoglou and Kassianidou analysed 40 samples of furnace and tuyère ceramics⁵.