Marguerite Yon

She was born Marguerite Marie Jeanne Calvet at Montpellier on 18 January 1937, the daughter of Raymond Calvet, an engineer, and Jeanne Girod¹⁴. She grew up in a family of eight children¹⁴. The Académie de Lyon's entry on her records that in 1968 she married Bernard Yon (1936-2005), a professor of French literature at the University of Saint-Étienne¹⁴.

She took a licence in classics, studied Sanskrit and ancient history, and passed the agrégation in classics in 1962¹⁴. After a year teaching at the girls' lycée of Roanne (1962/1963) she became a researcher at the CNRS in 1963¹⁴. Her third-cycle thesis, on the Cypriot speeches of Isocrates, was submitted at Lyon in 1967, and her doctorat ès lettres, Études d'archéologie chypriote, at Paris I-Sorbonne in 1975¹⁴. From 1969 to 1971 she was a pensionnaire of the Institut français d'archéologie de Beyrouth, and afterwards a CNRS researcher who also supervised theses at Lyon 2¹⁴. Besides Cyprus and Syria she dug at Aléria in Corsica (1964-1967), at Tureng Tepe in Iran (1965, 1967) and on Failaka in Kuwait (1995, 1996)¹⁴. She retired in 2002 as directeur de recherche emerita¹⁴.

The French mission at Salamis was funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and supported by the CNRS and the University of Lyon, with the Institut F. Courby as its academic base¹⁵. Its team of 1965, under Jean Pouilloux and Georges Roux, included "Marguerite Calvet(-Yon)"¹². In her own account the team arrived in April 1965 to find a site where nothing showed beneath the spring vegetation¹⁵. That first spring a tomb full of grave goods of the 11th century BC, called Tomb I, was found by chance under a Roman house, and she broke off sounding Z, which she had just begun in the south-east of the city, to dig the tomb herself¹⁵. She announced it in the Comptes rendus of the Académie des Inscriptions in 1966, and it was published in 1971 as Salamine II^15,16.

In 1968, a few hundred metres south of the monastery of St Barnabas, she dug a small rural sanctuary (site A) that yielded mainly female statuettes in limestone¹⁵. The yearly chronicle of excavations in Cyprus lists "Mlle M. Calvet" in that year's team, and "Mme M. Yon" in the team of 1970, with Annie Caubet and Yves Calvet^17,18. The sanctuary appeared in 1974 as Salamine de Chypre V: Un dépôt de sculptures archaïques (Ayios Varnavas, site A)¹⁶.

Pouilloux directed the mission from 1964 until the summer of 1972¹⁹. She writes that she took charge of it in 1972, when he was preparing to head the CNRS Centre de Recherches archéologiques¹⁵. Antoine Hermary later wrote that giving the post to "une jeune femme de 35 ans" was an exceptional event at the time, and a sign of the trust placed in her by Pouilloux and Roux in France and by Vassos Karageorghis in Cyprus¹³. Under her direction the mission held two campaigns in 1973: in May-June on the "temple of Zeus" and the building called the "oil-press", and in August-September on the sanctuary of the Geometric period²⁰.

The temple in the south-west of the city, she writes, was only properly taken up again in 1973, with a new team, and after a long campaign in May-June 1974 the autumn season was never held¹⁵. The Turkish invasion of July 1974 cut the fieldwork short after the spring campaign¹². In her words it stopped the work "brutalement", with no time to organise the interruption¹⁹. The study went on: she directed the series Salamine de Chypre from volume V to XVI (1974-2004), and the finished sectors of the town appeared as volumes II, V, XI and XV^12,14. She was the first to argue that the palace of Salamis stood on the hill of Daemonostasion¹.

Driven from Salamis, in Hermary's words, she dug at Amathus in 1975 within the new mission of the École française d'Athènes set up by Pierre Aupert, who calls her one of the site's first excavators^13,21. From 1976 the Lyon mission became the "mission de Kition et Salamine", working at Larnaca, ancient Kition¹⁵. Its first campaign, under her direction, was on the "Acropole de Bamboula" in 1976²². Hermary, who began working in Cyprus in 1977, lists her team then, at Kition and at the Maison de l'Orient in Lyon, as Olivier Callot, Y. Calvet, M.-J. Chavane, Th. Monloup, Th. Oziol and J.-F. Salles, and calls Caubet her "fidèle complice"¹³.

The third campaign, in September-October 1978, worked at the sanctuary of Herakles-Melqart and set out the sequence of occupation from Geometric I (11th century BC) to the early Hellenistic period²³. The season of 1987 ran from 14 September to 30 October on the sanctuaries of Astarte and Herakles-Melqart²⁴. In September 1988 the mission turned to the ancient harbour of the Classical period²⁵. There it found the ship-sheds (neoria) of the war harbour, which in the 4th century BC housed the fleet of the kings of Kition^26,27. In 1998 the north end of the building showed bays nearly 40 m long, which she took to confirm that the sheds were built for Athenian-type triremes²⁷. Hermary saw in the Kition-Bamboula excavation an important step in turning her research towards the Near East¹³.

In 1990 a Phoenician inscription on a marble block was found by chance in Larnaca, and she published it with Maurice Sznycer in the Comptes rendus of the Académie des Inscriptions (1991) and in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus (1992)²⁸. The two scholars disagree on the battle it commemorates. Christian Körner reports that Yon dates it to 392 BC and identifies it with the naval battle of Kition in Diodorus, where Evagoras was beaten by the Persian admiral Glos²⁹. Körner objects that Diodorus places that battle under 386/5 BC and finds the identification of the two battles hardly plausible²⁹.

She directed the series Kition-Bamboula (volumes I-VI, 1982-2016) and wrote volumes III, V and VI, the fifth being Kition dans les textes^14,16. Sabine Fourrier called her guide Kition de Chypre (2006) clear, precise and exhaustive³⁰. The mission has been in Fourrier's charge since 2008¹².

From 1978 to 1998 she directed the French mission at Ras Shamra-Ugarit in Syria^31,32. Yves Calvet succeeded her there in 1998³³. She wrote The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra (2006)¹⁴.

Her Manuel de céramique chypriote I appeared in Lyon in 1976, and her Dictionnaire illustré multilingue de la céramique du Proche-Orient ancien in 1981¹⁶. She founded the Publications de la Maison de l'Orient and ran them from 1975 to 1990, and co-edited the Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes from volume 28 to 45 (1998-2015)¹⁴. In 1965, at the suggestion of Jean Deshayes and with leave from Madeleine Rocher-Jauneau, she listed the Cypriot antiquities in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, and more than 25 years after Antoinette Decaudin's publication of 1987 she took up the collection again³.

A colloquium in Lyon in June 2002 honoured her, and Hermary called her a "wanassa" of Cypriot archaeology¹³. She received the silver medal of the CNRS in 1992 and the Prix Clermont-Ganneau of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 2013¹⁴. Elected to the Académie de Lyon on 5 December 2000, she was its president in 2015¹⁴. On 14 May 2015, at the Presidential Palace in Nicosia, the French mission received the rank of Grand Commander of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Cyprus¹⁹. About 90 boxes of her papers are held at the Archives départementales du Rhône, open to the public³⁴.