Alison K. South

Alison K. South directed the rescue season at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, a Late Bronze Age town that nobody knew existed until a new highway was planned across it. Her own contributor note in the Journal of Field Archaeology gives her training: a B.A. in Ancient History and Archaeology at Birmingham, graduate work in Egyptology in London, and excavation in the British Isles and Italy. She also dug at the Ceramic Neolithic settlement of Ayios Epiktitos-Vrysi between 1969 and 1974¹.

In 1976 she joined the staff of the Vasilikos Valley Project, the Brandeis University project in south-central Cyprus, and by 1982 she was its Assistant Director¹. Ian A. Todd appears beside her in the project's staff lists and in later reports on Kalavasos^1,7.

The rescue season at Ayios Dhimitrios

The Nicosia-Limassol highway prompted the first work. A trial sounding began on 22 July 1979, and South directed the rescue season of autumn and winter 1979-80^1,2. Her summary report, "Kalavassos-Ayios Demetrios 1979", appeared in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus for 1980^2,8.

Building X and the tombs

From 1982 the work moved to a large ashlar building, Building X, about 36 by 30 m, with a tripartite plan, a hall holding at least 40 pithoi and five clay cylinders bearing Cypro-Minoan signs. Archaeology in Cyprus reports it was read as an administrative centre³. The Bulletin de correspondance hellénique names "Ian A. Todd et Alison South Todd" as directors of the sixth campaign, from late May to late July 1984, under Brandeis patronage. In the same year a bronze cauldron turned up during illicit levelling in a field next to the site; the Cyprus Museum acquired it and restored it in its laboratory, and its stratigraphic context is unknown⁶.

The seventh season, in 1987, was again directed by Todd and South and financed by Brandeis, with the aim of recovering the full plan of Building X, which covered over 1,000 square metres⁷. Between 1987 and 1997 the team uncovered the whole building and a second pithos hall, buildings XI, XII and XIV, an olive-oil tank, and tombs 12 to 14 beneath the street west of Building X. These tombs held a Mycenaean chariot krater, a silver Hittite figurine, faience, ivories and gold. A further tomb complex, tombs 18 to 20, was dug in 1995-96. Roof beams from the pithos hall were sampled for radiocarbon and tree-ring dating by B. Weninger of Cologne⁴.

In 1995 the American Journal of Archaeology survey described the annual excavations as continuing "under the direction of Alison K. South", concentrated on Building X⁵.

Publications

With P. J. Russell, South wrote "Mycenaean pottery and social hierarchy at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, Cyprus", published in 1993 in the volume Wace and Blegen⁹. She wrote catalogue entry no. 30 in From Ishtar to Aphrodite, the 2003 New York exhibition of treasures from the museums of Cyprus¹⁰. Under the name Alison South-Todd she contributed a 2002 chapter, "Late Bronze Age settlement patterns in Southern Cyprus: the first Kingdoms?"¹¹.