Diana Buitron

Diana Buitron, later Buitron-Oliver, opened a votive deposit of about 1000 terracotta horsemen and chariots in the Archaic precinct of the Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion. Her first recorded work in Cyprus was in 1972, when the conservator Arthur Beale could not attend the American Expedition to Idalion and sent "a student being trained under his tutelage, Diana Buitron"¹¹.

In 1978 she and David Soren began a new American mission at the sanctuary, planned to continue the University of Pennsylvania Museum excavation of 1935 to 1953, which ended with the drowning of G. McFadden¹. The sponsors in 1978 included the Walters Art Gallery. The early seasons found the Archaic enclosure level, a belt fragment with two lions and a griffin, and a circular rubble altar dated to about 600 BCE^1,9.

In 1981 the work divided. Buitron directed a May season for the Walters, the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins on the Archaic precinct, while Soren worked on the temple for the University of Missouri⁴. She found a second altar and a rock-crystal scarab in a gilt-silver mount, and began to open a votive deposit of terracotta horsemen and chariots⁴. By 1982, when she is styled curator of Greek and Roman art at the Walters, the deposit was complete: about 10,000 fragments making roughly 1000 figures, 700 of them horsemen and 300 chariots⁵. The campaign of 1983 was the last excavation season, and the mission is listed as on a study season in 1986^6,8.

She wrote the Iron Age chapter of the 1983 catalogue of the Ringling Museum's Cypriot collection at Sarasota¹⁴, and with Andrew Oliver an article on the American missionary Lorenzo Warriner Pease, published in 1988¹⁵. The Archaic precinct appeared as Buitron-Oliver, The Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion: Excavations in the Archaic Precinct (Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology 109) in 1996¹⁸.