Larissa Hordynsky

Larissa Hordynsky co-directed the first excavation at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios in 1979, the Late Bronze Age settlement in the Vasilikos valley. She was then a graduate student in Classical and Oriental Studies at Brandeis University, and had joined Ian Todd's Vasilikos Valley Project in 1976 after earlier work at the Neolithic site of Dhali-Agridhi².

The project was sponsored by Brandeis and carried out with the permission and advice of Vassos Karageorghis, Director of the Department of Antiquities¹. Hordynsky worked on the chipped stone. In 1977 the report on the Kalavasos-Pamboules assemblage, was compiled from notes she submitted with Mary Ritt; it found local chert and no obsidian¹. She studied the chipped-stone industries of the valley sites over three seasons, planned a use-wear study of the stone from Kalavasos-Tenta for her dissertation, and with Alice Kingsnorth planned lithic reduction-sequence and microwear analysis². Todd's 1982 report adds that she spent much time on the design of the field survey².

In 1979 she and Jerald Johnson led the survey team that investigated the Ayios Dhimitrios site, where pithos sherds, ground stone and building rubble lay over an area of about 450 by 350 metres. They then directed square R 14. It produced Late Cypriot IIC storerooms with five pithoi, a Canaanite jar, a Late Helladic IIIB stirrup jar and a pilgrim flask, and a stamp seal lay below the floor². She and Johnson published a paper on systematic survey in the Vasilikos valley in 1983, and she wrote with Todd the chapter on the surface survey of Tenta, which a 2011 study cites for the definition of the Aceramic Neolithic there^8,9. Her dates of birth and death are not recorded.