Jean Pouilloux

In September 1963, on a boat trip along the Seine during the Congress of Classical Archaeology in Paris, Jean Pouilloux was offered a share of Salamis. Pierre Devambez of the Louvre had introduced him to Vassos Karageorghis, the newly appointed Director of Antiquities of Cyprus, who proposed that the site, too large for one mission, be divided^1,6.

Pouilloux was born on 31 October 1917 at Le Vert in Deux-Sèvres and died on 23 May 1996⁸. He studied at the École normale supérieure from 1939 to 1944, belonged to the École française d'Athènes from 1945 to 1949, and taught at the University of Lyon from 1949, becoming professor of Greek language, literature and epigraphy in 1957; he held the chair until 1985⁸. Before Cyprus he had worked at Delphi, Rhamnous and Thasos⁶. Karageorghis described him as an erudite historian rather than an archaeologist². Pouilloux described himself as a Protestant, and was a friend of Père Claude Mondésert, and a co-translator of Philo of Alexandria in the Sources chrétiennes series⁶.

The French mission at Salamis

According to Marguerite Yon, Pouilloux sought a training excavation and asked that Georges Roux, a specialist in ancient architecture, take part⁴. Jean Jehasse recalled that Pouilloux had first thought of Albania, and that Roux withdrew from the first trip at the last moment, so that Jehasse went in his place³. The administrative files were prepared in 1964. Funding came from the French Foreign Ministry, with support from the CNRS and the University of Lyon, and the academic base was the Institut Fernand-Courby at Lyon, which Pouilloux had founded and directed⁶.

In October 1964 Pouilloux and Jehasse spent a week reconnoitring the site with the plan made by Munro and Tubbs in 1890⁴. The Department of Antiquities reported the work as a Lyon expedition under Pouilloux, looking for the Classical city¹⁶. Yon separates this survey from the mission proper, which began with the first campaign in spring 1965⁴. Two campaigns a year followed in the southern sector of the site, where the team worked on the temple of Zeus, Campanopetra, the harbour wall and an eleventh-century BC tomb known as that of the princess⁶. From 1966 Pouilloux had a dig-house built, with laboratories, photographic and drawing rooms, stores and room for eighteen to twenty people⁶.

The foreman was Michalis Marinos Vaios, and the team included Roux, Jehasse, Nicole Weill, Marguerite Yon, Thérèse Monloup and Annie Caubet¹. Pouilloux insisted on quick publication, and the series Salamine de Chypre opened in 1969 with the volume on the lamps, written with Thérèse Oziol^4,11. In 1972 direction of the mission passed to Yon, when Pouilloux prepared to head the CNRS archaeological research centre; from 1976 he was the CNRS scientific director for the humanities⁶.

After 1974

Fieldwork ended with the Turkish invasion of July 1974. Karageorghis wrote that Pouilloux demanded to return in October of that year, found both dig-houses vandalised, and was refused his excavation notebooks as "war booty"; he then spoke publicly against the occupation¹. Karageorghis does not name the official who refused him.

Pouilloux founded the Maison de l'Orient méditerranéen ancien in 1975, later renamed the Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée Jean Pouilloux^6,8. He also helped secure Foreign Ministry funding for the French School's excavation at Amathus, together with Ph. Guillemin⁷.

Karageorghis wrote that Pouilloux ended his life an invalid after a difficult operation, in a house above the Rhône near Vienne. His grave bears only his name; Karageorghis wished it to read "Jean Pouilloux le Salaminien"¹.