The archaeology of Bronze Age Lapithos: from 1913 to 2025

Jenny Webb presents the results of a decade-long project to locate, document and publish the material and archival records from pre-1974 excavations at Lapithos on the north coast of Cyprus. Because the area has been inaccessible for fieldwork since the Turkish invasion of 1974, and because most early twentieth-century excavations at the site remained unpublished, the conventional view of the Middle Bronze Age long pictured an isolated island of peaceful, egalitarian agricultural villages. Webb argues that the north coast settlements of Vasilia, Vounous and Lapithos were outward-facing communities positioned along the maritime corridor between Anatolia, the Levant and the Aegean, and that Lapithos functioned as a gateway for the export of Cypriot copper.

The lecture traces the history of the 1913 excavations sponsored by the Cyprus Museum Committee under John Myres and Menelaos Markides, showing from archival folders in the Cyprus Museum that the fieldwork at Vrysi tou Barba was in fact directed and recorded by the twenty-four-year-old physical anthropologist Leonard Halford Dudley Buxton. Buxton supervised the digging of sixty-two Bronze Age tombs in four weeks and produced detailed day sheets with annotated plans and sketches of finds in situ. Webb combined these records with Markides's 1917 tombs and the Department of Antiquities' 1968–1969 rescue excavations to bring the total of published tombs from Lapithos to 124. She also accounts for missing objects through early dispersals to landowners such as Demosthenes Severis, possible gifts to colonial officials including Lady Goold-Adams, and lost paper labels.

Turning to the assemblage from c. 2200 to 1700 BC, Webb highlights thirty-eight plank figures, ceramic links with Vounous and the Karpas, and 1,840 metal artefacts, far more than any other Early or Middle Bronze Age site on the island. Portable XRF analysis by Andreas Charalambous shows tin bronze becoming dominant by Middle Cypriot II–III, used selectively for daggers, knives and gold-like toggle pins while spearheads remained arsenical copper. Tool marks, a lump of imported iron-arsenic speiss, and Anatolian wrap-over needles indicate local metalworking and small-scale personal mobility across the Cilician strait. High weapon ratios and the grouping of metal wealth in late chambers point to social inequality and a procurement network linking Lapithos across the Kyrenia passes to mining and transit centres such as Ambelikou, Dhenia and Ayia Paraskevi. In the discussion afterwards, Webb addresses Buxton's omission from later accounts, coastal anchorages via Karavostasi, and macroscopic wear on the weapons.