Law and Archaeology in British-Period Cyprus: The Case of Lapithos

In this paper for the CAARI and British Museum conference on archaeology in British-period Cyprus, Stella Diakou examines the antiquities legislation in force on the island between 1878 and 1964 and how those laws shaped the division and dispersal of excavated material abroad, using the 1931–1932 Pennsylvania Cyprus Expedition to Lapithos as a case study.

Diakou begins with the legal framework inherited from the Ottoman Empire: the Ottoman Land Code of 1869, in effect until 1946, which distinguished private mülk land from state-owned arazi miriye land, and the Ottoman Antiquities Law of 1874, provoked by the activities of Luigi Palma di Cesnola. Although the Ottoman Empire banned the export of antiquities in 1884, the British administration declined to apply that amendment to Cyprus and kept the 1874 law until passing the Antiquities Law of 1905. The 1905 law vested antiquities in the government, set up a Museum Committee to govern the Cyprus Museum (founded in 1882), retained a tripartite division for accidental finds, and gave the committee control over excavation permits and the allocation of duplicate or unwanted finds.

She then traces the 1927 amendment, passed on the arrival of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition to guarantee excavators a fixed share; out of 18,000 objects, the Swedes exported 12,000 in 771 boxes from Famagusta after the Swedish Crown Prince supervised the division. The Antiquities Law of 1935 created the Department of Antiquities, replaced the finder's share with monetary rewards, gave the Cyprus Museum and the British Museum priority over accidental finds, and aimed to grant excavators half of the remaining finds. Only the 1964 amendment after independence vested all excavated antiquities in the Cyprus Museum.

The second half of the paper draws on correspondence in the Penn Museum archives to reconstruct the Pennsylvania Cyprus Expedition at Lapithos, funded by Horace Jayne and directed by Bert Hodge Hill with Dorothy Hannah Cox, Lucy Talcott and Virginia Grace. In autumn 1931 the team excavated 38 Bronze Age tombs at Vrysi tou Barba, 20 Cypro-Geometric tombs at Ayia Anastasia, and 26 Geometric tombs on the Kastros plateau. Under the 1905 law, the Cyprus Museum kept Tomb 474, a bronze strainer, one complete Bronze Age tomb group, and selected pieces from nine other tombs, awarding the rest to Penn. Financial crisis halted the expedition in April 1932: 30 cases of pottery were shipped from Larnaca to Philadelphia in May 1932, while the remaining finds stayed in Nicosia, moved to Episkopi when Hill began digging at Kourion in 1935, went to the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1939, and returned to Philadelphia in 1966 to be catalogued in 1969.