Marguerite Yon

Marguerite Yon directed the University of Lyon's excavations at two sites on the coast of Cyprus, Salamis and Kition, for more than three decades. She signed herself "Directrice de la mission française 1972-2007"².

Salamis

The French mission at Salamis was agreed in late 1963 between Jean Pouilloux and Vassos Karageorghis, and Pouilloux directed it from 1964 until the summer of 1972². Yon took part in the first Lyon campaign in April 1965¹. A tomb of the 11th century BC came to light by chance that spring beneath a Roman house, and she published it as La tombe T.I du XIe s. av. J.-C., volume II of the series Salamine de Chypre (1971)^1,4.

In 1968 she excavated a small rural sanctuary a few hundred metres south of the monastery of St Barnabas, known as Ayios Varnavas site A, where the finds included stone statuettes. Her publication of it, Un dépôt de sculptures archaïques, is volume V of the same series^1,5. With Marie-José Chavane she produced the first fascicle of Testimonia Salaminia (volume X, 1978)⁶.

She took over the direction of the mission in 1972, when Pouilloux was preparing to head the Lyon research centre^1,2. The invasion of July 1974 stopped the fieldwork at Salamis, and the second part of that year's campaign was never held. Study of the results went on. Her successor as director of the mission was Sabine Fourrier, from 2008². In May 2015 the mission received the Order of Merit (Grand Commander) of the Republic of Cyprus².

Kition-Bamboula

From 1976 Yon directed a Lyon team at Bamboula, in Kition (modern Larnaca), in an area the Swedish Cyprus Expedition had explored in 1929^10,11. The work uncovered a sanctuary of Herakles-Melqart and Astarte, founded in the 9th century BC. From 1987 it turned to shipsheds of the 4th century BC in the ancient harbour¹⁰.

With Olivier Callot she reported new discoveries in the west necropolis of Kition in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus for 1987⁹. With Maurice Sznycer she published a royal Phoenician inscription from Kition in the Comptes rendus of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1991⁸. In 1993 she edited Kinyras: l'archéologie française à Chypre, the proceedings of a round table held in Lyon on 5 and 6 November 1991⁷.

The Lyon collection

In 1965, at the suggestion of Jean Deshayes and with the permission of the museum's director, Madeleine Rocher-Jauneau, she drew up a list of the Cypriot antiquities in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. In 2012 she published the collection in the Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes (volume 42), reworking a listing made by Antoinette Decaudin in 1987 and noting a new acquisition made that year³.