Ian Todd, who led the Vasilikos Valley Project at Kalavasos for 23 seasons, has died

Ian A. Todd, the archaeologist who founded the Vasilikos Valley Project in 1976 and directed it through 23 seasons of fieldwork near Kalavasos, died in early August 2026. The Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus published an obituary and offered its condolences to his wife, Alison South-Todd.

From central Anatolia to the Vasilikos valley

Todd took his first degree and doctorate at the University of Birmingham. He kept the photographic record at James Mellaart's excavation of Çatalhöyük, and his doctorate rested on a field survey of prehistoric mounds in central Anatolia in 1964–1966, which found the Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of Aşıklı Höyük; the dissertation became the first volume of Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology (SIMA) [1]. In 1969 he began teaching at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

His first fieldwork in Cyprus was on Edgar Peltenburg's excavation of the Ceramic Neolithic village of Ayios Epiktitos-Vrysi on the north coast. The Turkish invasion of 1974 ended work in the north, occupied ever since, and Todd moved to the Vasilikos valley [1].

In 1975 Vassos Karageorghis, then Director of the Department of Antiquities, pointed him to Kalavasos-Tenta, a small hill in the lower valley in Larnaca District. Todd planned a project to study the whole valley, from its first settlement to the Middle Ages, by excavation and by a field survey that ran from 1976 to 1989 and recorded 135 sites. Brandeis sponsored it; the US National Science Foundation funded it.

Tenta, Ayious and Ayios Dhimitrios

Kalavasos-Tenta was the project's Neolithic excavation, dug in 1976–1979 and again in 1984. Under the Tenta excavations lay a village of round stone and mudbrick houses, enclosed for part of its life by a wall and a ditch, and the central pier of one house, Structure 11, carries two painted human figures with raised arms, the only Neolithic wall painting known on the island. Todd first dated the village to the second half of the 6th millennium BCE, as a contemporary of Khirokitia. Once older villages such as Parekklisha-Shillourokambos had been dug, he and Carole McCartney moved its main occupation back into the 8th and early 7th millennia BCE.

In 1978–1980 the project excavated the Chalcolithic site of Kalavasos-Ayious across the valley. In 1979 the new Nicosia to Limassol road was about to cross the centre of a Late Cypriot town at Ayios Dhimitrios, 300 m from Tenta, and the team opened a rescue dig, helped in late 1979 by 75 soldiers of the National Guard. This became the excavation of Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, which Todd directed with Alison South until 1997. It found a planned Late Bronze Age town of about 11.5 ha with drained streets and Building X, an ashlar building of 35 by 30 m whose pithos halls held olive oil, five clay cylinders inscribed in Cypro-Minoan, and chamber tombs with gold jewellery.

In 1979–1980 Todd was the second director of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute in Nicosia, between Anita Walker and Stuart Swiny. He published the two final volumes on Tenta, in 1987 and 2005, and with Paul Croft the Ayious volume of 2004.

A volume in his honour

In 2025 Douglas Baird and Joanne Clarke edited a collection of studies for him, Prehistoric Anatolia and Cyprus, issued as SIMA 159 by Astrom Editions in Nicosia (ISBN 978-9925-7935-9-4). Its seventeen chapters (six on Anatolia, ten on Cyprus, one on Jordan) include a re-reading of Çatalhöyük from his 1960s slides and a reassessment of the Vasilikos survey records. The reviewer Giulia Albertazzi calls the Vasilikos Valley Project his principal contribution to Cypriot archaeology [1].