The Archaeological Work of the University of Cyprus, 2017: Xeros Valley survey, Skouriotissa mines, Nissia shipwreck and iMARECULTURE

This session in Greek from the annual review of the University of Cyprus presents four papers on fieldwork and research carried out in 2017.

Athanasios Vionis reports on the fourth season of the Settled and Sacred Landscapes of Cyprus (SeSaLaC) surface survey in the Xeros river valley around Kofinou, Agios Theodoros, Alaminos and Menogeia. In July 2017 the team completed pedestrian transects across the 2,500-hectare study area and aerial photography for a digital elevation model. Vionis traces settlement from a Middle Chalcolithic site at Alaminos and Early to Middle Bronze Age occupation at Alaminos-Kambos to a 13-hectare settlement around the Byzantine church of Panagia at Kofinou. Pottery there studied by Anna Georgiadou points to workshops in the sphere of Amathus, raising the question of whether the kingdom's eastern boundary extended beyond the Pentaschinos river towards Stavrovouni during the Cypro-Archaic period. The 2017 season also located a 9-hectare Early Byzantine pottery workshop near the Xeros producing coarse wares, tiles, water pipes and pithoi, analysed with portable XRF by Andreas Charalambous.

Vasiliki Kassianidou presents a project on the Skouriotissa mine and the Solea region, using early twentieth-century archives to reconstruct ancient galleries and slag heaps destroyed by open-cast copper mining. She reviews Kitchener's map, an 1897 manuscript map from the archive of Andreas Kordellas donated by Olga Kakavogianni, and Cyprus Mines Corporation (CMC) records. Photographs and negatives from the families of CMC directors Charles Jackson, James Latimer Bruce and Dean Creveling show ancient wooden ladders, the Skouriotissa slag heaps, and two oxhide ingots photographed together in the Famagusta shop of George Basil Palma before going to Harvey Mudd College and the Cyprus Museum. Maps by former CMC geologist Oscar Kortan record vanished galleries, slag heaps and a necropolis, while a 1963 photograph of Apliki by Giorgos Chrysostomou shows pithos bases. Radiocarbon dating with Stuart Manning dated one Skouriotissa slag heap to the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods, and mining baskets and ropes in the Cyprus Museum to the Late Bronze Age (LC II and LC III/Early Iron Age) and Late Antiquity.

Stella Demesticha reports on the 2014 and 2017 seasons at the Nissia shipwreck off Paralimni (Protaras). At 27 metres depth and disturbed by looting since the 1980s, the wreck preserves frames, ceiling planking, keelson and mast step from a wooden vessel over 35 metres long. An iron cannon raised in 2014, Ottoman pipe fragments and incised tableware date the wreck to the first half of the nineteenth century; stacked firewood, pointed timbers and galley firebricks were also uncovered.

Dimitra Perissiou, with Massimiliano Secci and Demesticha, introduces the Horizon 2020 project iMARECULTURE, coordinated by the Cyprus University of Technology. It builds virtual reality dive visits for the Classical Mazotos wreck, Xlendi in Malta and Baiae in Italy, 3D libraries of amphorae and ships, a virtual underwater excavation training game, and a serious game on Classical and Hellenistic maritime trade. Demesticha closes with a video by Secci on the emergency 3D documentation of a traditional caique at Latchi.