Salamis, Gastria and Kourion: Hake and Kitchener for the South Kensington Museum (1882)

In 1882 George Gordon Hake explored about 45 tombs near the monastery of St Barnabas at Salamis for the South Kensington Museum^1,2. The campaign is known as the Hake-Kitchener excavations; Herbert Kitchener was present for part of the time at Salamis, and Rogge describes Hake as Kitchener's assistant who did most of the fieldwork². Hake also worked at Gastria, where the Cyprus Museum catalogue identifies an early Graeco-Phoenician necropolis and notes no details of tomb groups¹, and at Kourion, where a report on Hake's excavations is listed in the archival record³. Tatton-Brown's 1987 survey dates the work at all three sites to 1883, while Rogge and the catalogue place it in 1882^2,4.

The Museum's authorities required that work be conducted from the "aesthetic rather than archaeological point of view", and the collection of complete tomb groups was explicitly discouraged². Rogge, Ioannou and Mavrojannis characterize the campaign as limited in archaeological scope, and judge that Hake's brief reports nevertheless suggest some awareness of basic archaeological recording².

A copy of the South Kensington file on Hake's excavations is listed among the records of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum³. A Polychrome (VII) jug from Kitchener's 1882 excavations was transferred from the Victoria and Albert Museum to the British Museum in the 1980s⁵.