PORPHYRA Workshop, session 1: opening addresses and Bronze Age purple dye production on Chrysi

This first session of the PORPHYRA Workshop, organised by the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus and the INSTAP Study Center for East Crete on the materiality of purple dye production in Cyprus and the Aegean, comprises the opening addresses and the keynote lecture.

Chair Athanasios Vionis introduces Marina Solomidou-Ieronymidou, Director of the Department of Antiquities, who welcomes participants and notes that the workshop grew out of the discovery of great amounts of purple shells at the Hadjiabdullah site at Kouklia since 2016.

Maria Iacovou then explains how the Palaepaphos Urban Landscape Project unexpectedly encountered a 430-kilogram cache of purple shells in the industrial and storage units of the Cypro-Classical citadel complex at Palaepaphos. She describes bringing zooarchaeologist Dimitra Mylona from Crete to study the 4th-century BC assemblage at a laboratory in Ktima Paphos, and reviews the scarce Cypriot evidence for purple dye production atPyrgos-Mavrorachi, Marion and the Late Bronze Age site of Hala Sultan Tekke.

In the keynote lecture, co-authored with Dimitra Mylona, Chrysa Sofianou, Vilia Apostolakou, Philip Betancourt and Melissa Eaby, Thomas Brogan presents excavations on the island of Chrysi south of Ierapetra in Minoan Crete. In the Late Minoan IB Building B1 (1525 to 1450 BC), rooms 2 to 4 functioned as a purple dye workshop with two hearths, tripod cooking pots over ash from crushed olive stones and almond shells, stone pounding tools, triton shells used as scoops, and some 3,900 crushed and intact Hexaplex trunculus shells alongside Euthria cornea shells bearing predation holes from live storage in baskets or tanks. Brogan contrasts Building B1 with Buildings A2 and A3, which held paved platforms and saddle querns, and Building B2, an administrative residence containing copper and tin ingots, gold and lapis lazuli jewellery, and a nodulus sealing. He also examines Middle Minoan II (c. 1850 to 1750 BC) sorted shell deposits on Chrysi, linking them through granodiorite-tempered pottery to Gournia and the rock-cut dyeing vats at Alatzomouri-Pefka.

In the discussion afterwards, Brogan and Mylona address the Late Minoan IB abandonment of Cretan coastal sites, why whole small shells were sorted from crushed ones, the chemical stability of purple pigment during transport, and Minoan loom weights.