The Excavations in Larnaca's Salt Lake (1864–1868): Diplomacy and the Antiquities Trade before Colonial Rule

Pauline Maillard examines the excavations carried out on the eastern shores of the Salt Lake at Larnaca, known as the Saline, between 1864 and 1868, just before British colonial rule. Drawing on her doctoral research, she asks whether a contextual study is still possible for archaeological material dug in the 1860s by teams of foreign diplomats.

The site yielded large numbers of finely made terracotta figurines of the Cypro-Archaic and Cypro-Classical periods, along with at least four Greek inscriptions and one in Phoenician. Maillard traces the sequence of diggers through diplomatic and family archives. In 1864 Charles de Maricourt, brother of the French consul Louis de Maricourt, chanced upon the site; as the research of Lucie Bonato in the family correspondence shows, Sunday afternoon surface collecting soon turned into unrecorded digging. After Louis de Maricourt died in the cholera epidemic of August 1865, his successor Tiburce Colonna-Ceccaldi reported the sanctuary and its assemblage to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1868 and to the Revue Archéologique in 1869, where his brother Georges Colonna-Ceccaldi published the first map of the finds in 1870.

In July 1865 the British vice-consul Dominic Ellis Colnaghi joined the French work. The finds were divided: the de Maricourt share remained largely with the family apart from a few pieces given to the Louvre, while Colnaghi donated his entire share of at least 230 figurines to the British Museum in 1866, accompanied by sketches and letters to Charles Newton. Between 1866 and 1868 the American consul Luigi Palma di Cesnola dug the northeastern hill above the lake, destroying much of what remained, inventing a non-existent temple, and also opening tombs, probably belonging to the Roman necropolis of Kition. His trenches are located only on a map by the French consul Auguste Dozon published fifteen years later in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum. Max Ohnefalsch-Richter and Robert Hamilton Lang later recorded that Cesnola's workmen had ransacked the place and that looting continued through the 1870s.

Maillard concludes that reconstructing the Saline corpus requires tracking objects through museum registers and auction catalogues, understanding the diplomatic manoeuvring behind the exports, and setting aside all pieces attributed to the Salt Lake by Cesnola so as to preserve the credibility of the assemblage.