Gunnel Hult

Gunnel Hult reopened the Nitovikla fortress on the north-east coast of Cyprus from the boxes of sherds and the notes kept in Stockholm. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition had noticed a small burial ground there in 1928, and in autumn 1929 Erik Sjöqvist excavated the tombs, twelve of them robbed and three intact and all of Middle Cypriot III, together with the fortress¹.

Hult published the Hala Sultan Tekke volumes in Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology: Hala Sultan Tekke 4, written with D. McCaslin in 1978, and Hala Sultan Tekke 7, on the 1977 excavations in Area 8, in 1981^12,13. In 1983 she published Bronze Age Ashlar Masonry in the Eastern Mediterranean, which covers Cyprus, Ugarit and neighbouring regions and which Crewe cites for early Syrian-influenced ashlar masonry at Nitovikla^5,8.

Her main Cypriot work is Nitovikla Reconsidered, Medelhavsmuseet Memoir 8, published in Stockholm in 1992 (pp. 1-225)⁹. Two shorter pieces followed in 1994: "An Excavation of an Excavation" in Rystedt's volume on the Swedish Cyprus Expedition (pp. 63-69) and "Qatna and Nitovikla" in Levant 26 (pp. 189-197)^10,11. Göransson calls the study an "excavation of an excavation" in which she reconsidered Einar Gjerstad's interpretation of the fortress, and cites it for what the c. 5,000 boxes of expedition sherds brought to Stockholm can still yield¹. Eriksson reports that, following Hult, the construction of Nitovikla is redated to Late Cypriot IB, where earlier work had put its destruction at the end of the Middle Cypriot period⁷. Her dates of birth and death are not recorded.