Kalavasos remembers Ian Todd on 7 November with talks and villagers' photographs of the digs

The village of Kalavasos will hold an evening in memory of Ian A. Todd on Saturday 7 November 2026 at 5.00 p.m., in the museum on the village square. Todd, who died in August, led the excavations around Kalavasos for 23 seasons. The evening, "An Evening of Kalavasos Archaeology", is organised by Alison South, his wife, whose notice the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute shared on its Facebook page on 23 October.

The programme

According to the organisers, Lefteris Sozou, president of the Community Council, opens the evening at 5.00. South then speaks for 35 minutes on Todd's life and work in Kalavasos, in English with Greek subtitles. Her talk covers the Vasilikos Valley Project, its digs at Tenta and at several other sites, and the archaeologists' life in the village.

David Pearlman follows until 6.05 on life and archaeology in Kalavasos, speaking in Greek with some English subtitles. Sheena Crawford's talk, "Ethnographic adventures in Kalavasos", in English and Greek, runs to 6.25. The last quarter of an hour, to 6.40, belongs to villagers who worked with the archaeologists, with their comments and pictures.

South asks villagers who worked on the team to come with their memories and any photographs of themselves with the archaeologists. Photographs can be given to her or to Crawford, who will prepare them for showing on the big screen.

The speakers and the village

South joined the project in 1976, its first year, and by 1982 was its Assistant Director. She directed the rescue season of 1979–80 at the Late Bronze Age town of Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, on the line of the new Nicosia to Limassol road, and later ran that excavation with Todd. Pearlman and Crawford both appear on the project's field staff list for 1979. That season the team dug at the Neolithic village of Kalavasos-Tenta and the Chalcolithic site of Ayious, and made its first sounding at Ayios Dhimitrios. Pearlman's 1984 master's thesis at the University of Minnesota was an ethnoarchaeological study of chert knappers and the dhoukanes, threshing sledges set with stone blades, in Cyprus.

Part of the project's work lay under the village houses. In 1978, after bulldozing for shops east of the Panayia church, the team and the Department of Antiquities rescued thirteen Bronze Age chamber tombs, most of the digging done within ten days. Building work in 1987 exposed sixteen more near the church and the old school, and in December that year the Department and the project excavated seven north of the cinema. Most of the pottery from them is Middle Bronze Age. Todd edited the two volumes that publish them, in 1986 and 2007, and Pearlman compiled the list of village tombs in the first with him.