This Week in Cypriot Archaeology: 13–19 July 2026

The Department of Antiquities opened applications this week for eight archaeologists to digitise finds held in the state museums, and said the old Cyprus Museum building in Nicosia will stay an archaeological museum once its collections move to the new one. At Maroni, a Cornell master's student is excavating and working on digital reconstructions, and the director of the Hala Sultan Tekke excavations put a figure on how long the whole city would take to dig.

Map of Cyprus

This week's stories

• Fieldwork
• Research
• Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

N

50 km

Sites on this map

1. 1Maroni
2. 2Hala Sultan Tekke

Museums

The Department of Antiquities announced on 17 July that it is recruiting eight archaeologists on fixed-term contracts of 42 months, on salary scales A8, A10 and A11, for the Digitisation of the Cyprus Museum. Norway's financial mechanism for 2021–2028 and the Republic of Cyprus are paying for the project together. Applications are open from 17 July to 11 September 2026. The team's task is to study about 100,000 ancient movable finds kept in the storerooms of the state museums and add them to CADiP, the Cyprus Archaeological Digitisation Programme, the Department's digital database.

The same week the Department answered the artist Nikos Kouroussis, who had proposed in a letter that the future State Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus should be housed in the Cyprus Museum building. The Department said this is not the state's intention. The building is a declared Ancient Monument of Schedule A under the Antiquities Law, and the Department will keep it and keep its headquarters there. When the archaeological collections move to the new Archaeological Museum of Cyprus, the old building is to show repatriated antiquities, donations and an exhibition on the history of the museum and of Cypriot archaeology, and to go on hosting exhibitions, concerts and performances. The Department recalled that the museum was founded in 1882 and that work on the present building began in 1907. The new museum is still under construction; MPs were told in September that it will not be handed over before 2028 (our report).

Fieldwork

Anna Port, an archaeology master's student at Cornell University, is spending the summer at Maroni, on the south coast between Larnaca and Limassol, according to a profile published by Cornell's Graduate School on 17 July. She is excavating a Bronze Age fortified complex and taking samples from Byzantine churches for dendrochronology, dating by tree rings. Her research deals with digital reconstructions of Maroni and Kalavasos: how they can represent space and experience at the two sites, and how they could be used to teach museum visitors. Maroni was settled from about 1650 BCE and abandoned around 1200 BCE; its best-known building is the Ashlar Building at Vournes.

Research

Peter M. Fischer of the University of Gothenburg directs the New Swedish Cyprus Expedition at Hala Sultan Tekke, beside the Larnaca Salt Lake. His paper on the goldwork of eight Late Bronze Age tombs dug there between 2016 and 2024, nine diadems and two mouthpieces, came out in February (that week's issue). Speaking about it this week, Fischer said that only a small part of the city has been excavated, and that by his calculation digging all of it would take "at least 630 years".