David Soren

In 1978 David Soren and Diana Buitron opened a new American excavation at the Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion, on ground the University Museum of Pennsylvania had worked from 1935 to 1953 until George McFadden drowned^1,6. Six years later Soren was digging a Late Roman house on the acropolis above it, and the destruction of that house he dated to 21 July AD 365.

The sanctuary seasons

The first season, in June and July 1978, was sponsored by the Walters Art Gallery, Columbia Museum Associates, the University of Maryland Baltimore County and Dartmouth College¹. The Walters and the University of Missouri sponsored the 1979 campaign². Buitron and Soren are named as directors, and a gold and a silver bull figurine were recorded under the round altar in the Archaic sector². Thomas Davis lists the sanctuary work as 1978 to 1984⁷.

According to Benjamin Costello, the project divided in 1980, with Buitron taking the Archaic precinct and Soren the Temple of Apollo and the ground south-west of it⁸. That year Soren also made a small survey around the foot of the acropolis and the hill of Yerokarka, which Costello calls the first systematic survey of the area⁸.

In 1981 the two seasons ran separately. Buitron's, sponsored by the Walters, Maryland and Johns Hopkins, found a pit holding about 4,000 terracotta figurines in the Archaic precinct. Soren's, sponsored by Missouri, worked on the Temple of Apollo, which the report dated to AD 50-100, and on the Round Building, 18 metres across, found in 1978 and identified in 1979³. The Department of Antiquities carried out its own reconstruction of the temple that year under J. Rutherford³. Soren, with J. C. Biers, edited Studies in Cypriote Archaeology the same year (UCLA Institute of Archaeology Monograph 18)¹². Buitron and Soren ended their work at the sanctuary in 1985⁸, and Soren edited The Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion, Cyprus (University of Arizona Press, 1987)¹¹.

The Earthquake House

In 1984 Soren began excavating for the University of Arizona on the acropolis. He reopened Trench III of the Pennsylvania mission, working from the field notebooks and a photograph that G. Roger Edwards of the University Museum sent him⁸. The house yielded the skeletons of a child and of an animal tied to a trough^4,8. Soren published the first season with Thomas Davis as Seismic Archaeology at Kourion: The 1984 Campaign in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus for 1985¹⁰.

In 1986 the dig moved north of the 1984 area. It exposed a kitchen with an oven, a pithos, amphorae, a bronze jug and coins, and a basin room with a coral and amber necklace. The report dated the destruction of all the rooms to 21 July 365 on the evidence of late Roman coins^5,8. The excavation stopped at the end of the 1987 season⁸. In 1988 Soren and Jamie James published the popular account Kourion: The Search for a Lost Roman City (Doubleday)⁹. The 1981 report had dated the Temple of Apollo's destruction to 367 or 368³.

The 365 date has not held. Costello, summarising the debate in 2014, writes that the hypothesis has been convincingly challenged and largely invalidated, with the earthquake of that year placed off Crete and the destruction at Kourion put perhaps between 370 and 380⁸.

After the dig

Benjamin Costello, who had been one of Soren's undergraduates at Arizona, was later given access to the Earthquake House finds and records and published them as a British Archaeological Reports volume in 2014⁸. A later study of earthquakes and gardens at Saint Hilarion cites personal correspondence with Soren, dated 25 November 2020, for his proposal to reconstruct the Temple of Apollo with the film set designer Harry Lange. The Department of Antiquities rejected it¹⁴.