Pyla-Kokkinokremos: the Bretschneider, Driessen and Kanta excavations

On the Kokkinokremos plateau in 2016, a complete Egyptian alabaster flask painted with a lotus garland lay hidden in a rock-cut pit, filled with small bronze, faience and bone or ivory items, including a cylinder seal¹. Joachim Bretschneider, Jan Driessen and Athanasia Kanta began a joint excavation of the site in 2014, each leading a team in a separate sector^2,3.

Returning to the plateau

The project resumed work after Dikaios (1952), Karageorghis and Demas (1981–1982) and Karageorghis and Kanta (2010–2012)⁴. Those earlier campaigns had concentrated on the plateau edges and might have biased views of the settlement, so random tests in the centre and north were planned as a remedy⁴. The authors also set out to understand the multicultural character of the site against the debate on migration, interaction and acculturation in the late 13th and early 12th centuries BC, to map all remains, and to follow the casemate wall and see whether highly organised residential units were the norm on the plateau³.

The Université catholique de Louvain team under Driessen worked in Sector 3 on the plateau, the Mediterranean Archaeological Society team under Kanta in Sector 4 at the West Gate, and the Ghent team under Bretschneider in Sector 5 on the south-east lobe^2,4. The Department of Antiquities gave its collaboration⁴. The hill lies within the Dhekelia Sovereign Base Area, whose authorities allowed work on the base land, including drone flights at up to 50 m^3,4. The Cyprus Institute team under Sorin Hermon handled 3D documentation, geodesy and geo-radar⁴.

The first campaign ran from 25 October to 16 November 2014. A robotic total station, differential GPS and a drone recorded about 10,000 measurements in under a week, and about 700 aerial photographs covered 29 ha^3,4. Campaigns followed each spring from 2015 to 2019, then in autumn 2021 (delayed from April 2020) and in spring 2023, and the project lists short reports for 2024 and 2025^4,5,6.

What the sectors held

In Sector 3, three tests of 2014 gave a floor with fine vases in Trench 3.1, bronze scraps, a lunar or boat-shaped earring and an ash concentration tentatively linked to metalworking in Trench 3.2, and three spaces in Trench 3.3³. In 2016 Trench 3.3 revealed metalworking remains in Space 3.8 as well as the alabaster flask, and Trench 3.4, on the highest point, exposed a roughly square building of about 10 by 10 m¹.

In Sector 4 the team extended the North Complex first investigated in 2012. Room 7 held layers of smashed vases, a bath tub, and a rock-cut water channel and basin³. A shaft about 2.90 m deep yielded a Pastoral Style krater decorated with bulls, and the excavator suggested the shaft was a cistern collecting roof water³. Room 13 gave a bronze hoe and mallet, a lead scale weight and a miniature Astarte pendant possibly of silver³. Sector 4.2 showed the casemate wall projecting below the plateau top¹.

Sector 5 began in 2014 with six partly excavated spaces and was extended every year, reaching 47 spaces over about 78 m north to south by 12 m east to west by 2019^2,3. Its architecture has terraces cut into bedrock, plastered floors and rock-cut shafts; reports mention a metal workshop (Space 5.31), a monumental twin shaft (5.27) and a 3.40 m shaft in plastered Room 5.40^2,4. In 2019 nine shafts in the north of the sector held, among other things, a pithos, a roughly 5 kg lump of metal ore, an alabaster vase and a piece of copper ingot, and Space 5.35 yielded 17 stone loom weights^2,4. Sector 7, on the west slope of the eastern outcrop, showed five isolated buildings in 2019². The stratigraphy is usually topsoil, collapse and objects in situ on the floor⁴.

Dating and the finds

Bretschneider, Driessen and Kanta treat the settlement as short-lived, established before the end of the 13th century BC and abandoned suddenly early in the 12th (Late Cypriot IIC to IIIA)⁷. They call it a time capsule of the crisis years, with objects from Sardinia, Crete, Egypt, Anatolia, Mycenaean Greece and the Syro-Palestinian coast, and say that who founded it and why it was abandoned cannot be answered for now⁷. Mycenaean, Minoan, Sardinian, Hittite and Canaanite pottery appears beside local Cypriot ware¹.

Finds entered in the Larnaka Museum inventory carry a PK number made of year and item number, for example PK18–947; other material keeps its field number and is stored in the Terra Umbra Facility of the Larnaka Museum^3,4. The metal finds of 2016 were restored at the Cyprus Museum⁴. The 2014 campaign appeared in Ugarit-Forschungen 46 (2015), the 2015 and 2016 campaigns in Ugarit-Forschungen 48 (2018), and the 2014 to 2019 campaigns in Aegis 24 (2023), which its authors call a preliminary account^3,4,8. The 2023 season worked in Sector 5 (Spaces 5.48 to 5.53) and Sector 7, and the finds include Canaanite jars, two Base Ring II juglets, a copper alloy axe and a Mycenaean amphoroid crater with a band of deer⁵.