Cypriot Archaeology between Classical and Near Eastern Traditions

In this lecture at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago, Catherine Kearns examines how Cypriot archaeology developed between classical, Near Eastern, and prehistoric research traditions. Asking why Cyprus sits outside many museum narratives despite supplying tens of thousands of objects to Western collections, Kearns uses eight finds and sites to trace 150 years of fieldwork, classification, and heritage politics.

She begins with the Red Polished Vounous bowl from Bellapais-Vounous, excavated by Porphyrios Dikaios, to critique the cliché of Cyprus as a passive cultural meeting place. Turning to 19th-century antiquarianism, she discusses the Archaic stone vase taken from Amathus to the Louvre in 1866 and Luigi Palma di Cesnola, whose export of over 35,000 objects founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection and prompted the 1882 petition for the Cyprus Museum. Kearns then tracks the turn to typology under British rule through John Linton Myres, who excavated Base Ring ware near Larnaca and Hala Sultan Tekke and catalogued the Cyprus Museum, and Einar Gjerstad's Swedish Cyprus Expedition (1927–1931), which excavated the Ayia Irini sanctuary and took two-thirds of its finds to Stockholm before the 1935 Antiquities Law.

For the Late Bronze Age, Kearns covers Joan du Plat Taylor's 1938–1939 rescue excavation of the copper-mining settlement at Apliki Karamallos and the sanctuary of the Horned God at Enkomi, where clashes between Claude Schaeffer and Dikaios ended their joint mission. She closes with Vassos Karageorghis's work at Roman Salamis, the halting of fieldwork in the occupied north after the Turkish invasion of 1974, Maria Iacovou's project at Kouklia-Hadjiabdullah and the Classical rampart and tumulus at Paphos, and the UNESCO listing of the Troodos painted churches alongside the 1989 Indiana court case and the 1999 US import restrictions.