To Ergon 2019: Palaepaphos, the Protaras and Mazotos shipwrecks, the Xeros valley and the Aegean

This Greek-language recording is the opening session of the fifth annual review of the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus, covering fieldwork conducted in 2019. After welcoming addresses by the unit's director Athanasios Vionis, the rector Tasos Christofides, and the director of the Department of Antiquities Marina Solomidou-Ieronymidou, Apostolos Sarris chairs four papers on projects in Cyprus and the Aegean.

Maria Iacovou presents the 2019 season at Palaepaphos, focusing on the Cypro-Classical workshop and storage complex on the Hadjiabdullah plateau. Excavation of units 2, 5 and 8 exposed mudbrick slab floors, a drainage channel, and a sunken pithos set before an olive-press basin. The season's principal find, studied with Artemis Karnava, is a fourth-century BC potsherd inscribed in black ink in the Paphian Cypriot Syllabary, contemporary with King Nikokles. Recording three lines of commodity quantities and the name Philegalos, it provides the first evidence at Paphos for a standardized palace accounting system comparable to the Phoenician and syllabic archive at Idalion, as well as accounting ostraca from Salamis, Kition and Athienou.

Stella Demesticha reports on two underwater shipwreck investigations. In June and July 2019 her team documented a newly reported Roman wreck of the first to second centuries AD at 37 metres depth off Protaras. The surface cargo of 188 amphorae includes 149 Dressel 2-4 vessels and eight 128-litre Syrian jars from Ras al-Bassit; Demesticha considers whether it relates to the nearby shallow wreck at Fig Tree Bay recorded by Justin Leidwanger. She then turns to the seventh season at the fourth-century BC Mazotos wreck, where excavation reached the wooden hull. Unlike the wine-glass profiles of the Kyrenia and Ma'agan Mikhael ships, Mazotos had a conservative rounded bottom and seven frames of beech and cherry wood. Questions after her paper address the spatial grouping of the Roman amphorae and how pointed amphora toes were stowed aboard ship.

Athanasios Vionis summarises the completion of ceramic study for the Boeotia Project in central Greece, highlighting the Frankish and Ottoman village of Palaiopanagia near Askra, where sixteenth-century agricultural surpluses funded imported Italian, Ottoman and Greek glazed tablewares. He then reports on the 2019 surface and geoarchaeological survey of the Settled and Sacred Landscapes of Cyprus project in the Xeros River valley around Kofinou, Agios Theodoros, Alaminos and Menogeia, where grid collection and kernel density analysis show peak rural settlement between the fifth and seventh centuries AD.

Finally, Ourania Kouka presents work in the eastern Aegean: the study of Hans Walter's unpublished Bronze Age pottery from the Heraion of Samos alongside Sergios Menelaou, and excavations at Liman Tepe (Klazomenai) near Smyrna, which exposed Late Helladic IIIC terraced houses, kilns, and extramural infant jar burials set into abandoned houses outside the fortification wall. A brief discussion follows on why infants were buried separately from adults near the houses.