Pyrgos-Mavroraki: the Italian Mission (CNR-ITABC)

At Pyrgos-Mavroraki, the south yard of a Bronze Age industrial complex held 18 pit furnaces, 112 stone tools and two intact axe moulds, interpreted as evidence for refining and casting copper¹. The settlement was found by an Italian mission led by Maria Rosaria Belgiorno, who directed the work from 1995 to 2012^2,3.

Finding the settlement

The Department of Antiquities had already dug tombs of an Early to Middle Cypriot necropolis under the modern village of Pyrgos (the Department's rescue excavations). The settlement was discovered in 1995, following the distribution of those tombs⁴. The Italian mission surveyed it in 1996 and 1997⁵. Steel separately reports a Limassol Pyrgos Survey of three seasons, 1994 to 1996⁶.

Excavation at Pyrgos-Mavroraki began in 1998 and ran to 2012^5,7; a ninth season was reported for 2007⁸. The Department's report says the Italian mission had been co-funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 1998⁹. The CNR is listed as sponsor¹⁰, with further funding from the Cultural Association Tuscia Cultura⁹.

In 2002 and 2003 a CNR team under P. Mauriello mapped buried structures over an area of 70 by 70 m by electrical resistivity⁷. The Department's 2008 report puts the whole site at 4,000 square metres by geophysical prospection and GIS, with the excavated complex at about 2000 square metres; another publication gives the settlement, by GIS, as about 35 hectares^7,9. The team also used archaeometry, palaeobotany, palaeozoology and ethnoarchaeology⁹. In 2005 the Centre for Experimental Archaeology Antiquitates of Blera ran the first experimental trials to reconstruct the copper processing¹.

The industrial complex

The main building was an architectural complex of about 2000 square metres with intercommunicating rooms, buried by wall collapse. The excavator assigns its rooms to olive oil, copper refining, perfume, dyeing, weaving and wine preparation⁹. In the north yard the team recorded roasting beds, furnaces and crushing tools for copper processing¹. Steel summarises a copper workshop of about 300 square metres with water channels, ore-crushing tools, stone-built circular furnaces and one figure-of-eight furnace²; Keswani gives the installation as about 1,000 square metres¹¹.

In 2008 the team found a second building south of the industrial area. The two-room triangular building measures 12 by 12 by 24 m. It held an altar flanked by a channel, four calcarenite horns and fragments of bull and ram skulls. The excavator proposed that it was a cult site, and that a smaller triangular structure below it could belong to an earlier sanctuary of the Early Bronze Age⁹. A bull's head, sample context SL (PY 09 D.10 B), measures 28 cm long and 10 cm wide⁵.

Dating and criticism

The Department's 2008 report dates the start of occupation to the earliest Early Bronze Age, 2400 to 2000 BC, and the deepest levels held a pair of Philia-phase copper earrings with shell pendants, taken to show earliest Early Bronze Age use⁹. Belgiorno holds that Philia and Early Bronze Age I to III material lies beneath the Middle Bronze Age remains, and that the site was not reoccupied after about 1800 BC¹. The destruction by earthquake is dated differently in successive publications: around 1800 BC in the 2008 report, around 1850 BC (end of Middle Bronze Age II) in 2009, and 1900 to 1850 BC by Lentini and Belgiorno^5,9,10.

Keswani takes the site as direct evidence for labour-intensive smelting of copper sulphide ores at an early date in south central Cyprus¹¹. Knapp says the association of the metallurgical finds with datable structures is uncertain, citing Muhly, and faults the excavator for publishing elaborate scenarios without adequate stratigraphic discussion¹². Andreou leaves out the wide range of industrial activities Belgiorno assigns, citing lack of evidence and incomplete publication, and considers the "cult" building more likely domestic¹³.

Publication and the site today

Belgiorno, Ferro and Loepp published a study of the metallurgy in 2012¹. Scripta Cypria II is the first volume of the full publication of the structures and material⁷. The Department of Antiquities has expropriated the excavated land, under two hectares of a settlement estimated at 35 hectares, and the area has been fenced⁷.