Maria Iacovou

The authority record of the Bibliothèque nationale de France gives her date of birth as 15 May 1957²⁶. Wikidata alone gives her birthplace as Famagusta²⁷. A Fulbright travel grant took her to study in the United States from 1976 to 1978, and in 1978 she took a B.A. summa cum laude in Classics and Classical Archaeology at the State University of New York at Albany²⁵. She then went to the Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati as a Louise Taft-Semple Fellow from 1979 to 1984, and took her Ph.D. there in pre-Classical archaeology in 1984²⁵. In 1982 she worked as a temporary archaeological officer in the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus²⁵.

In the preface to Palaepaphos-Skales (1983), Vassos Karageorghis wrote that "the onerous task of checking my descriptions and verifying my classification, as well as the critical examination of the whole of my text, was carried out by Maria Iacovou and Dr. Carolyn Elliott"¹⁰. Iacovou later dedicated an article to Karageorghis, "under whose guidance I began a decade ago to study the endlessly intriguing period of the eleventh century B.C."²⁸. Her corpus The Pictorial Pottery of Eleventh Century B.C. Cyprus appeared in 1988 as SIMA 79 and numbered 34 vases; the 1992 article added to it²⁸. In 1986 she was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies in London, Centenary Bursar of the British School at Athens and honorary research fellow in Classical Archaeology at University College London²⁵.

From 1987 to 1997 she was director of the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, editor-in-chief of its publication programme and curator of its Cyprological collections²⁵. A Cyprus High Commission speaker biography says she was in charge of developing the Cypriot collections, "and especially the Cyprus Map Collection"²⁹. In those ten years, the contributor note in Philippa Steele's 2013 volume says, she worked extensively on the historical cartography of Cyprus and on Cypriot coinage³⁰. Writing in Cyprus Today, she called Moullart-Sanson's map of the Cypriot kingdoms, engraved in Paris in the first quarter of the 18th century, "a historical document" with no ambition towards innovative cartography³¹. When she moved to the University of Cyprus, Ellen Herscher wrote in the American Journal of Archaeology in 1998 that "the foundation's outstanding director since its inception" had joined the faculty of its Archaeological Research Unit³².

She was elected associate professor in the Department of History and Archaeology in 1998^25,30. The sources disagree on the year she became professor: the University's profile and Steele give 2009, while the High Commission biography gives 2008^25,29,30. They disagree too on her Stanley Seeger Visiting Research Fellowship in the Hellenic Studies Programme at Princeton, dated 1996 in the University's profile and 2006 by Steele^25,30. In 2004 she was British Academy Visiting Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford, and she held Onassis Foundation fellowships in Greece in 2004-05 and in the United States in 2011²⁵.

She organised the 1998 conference "Cyprus. The Historicity of the Geometric Horizon" at the Archaeological Research Unit²⁵. In December 2010 a study day in Nicosia honoured Nicolas Coldstream, and she edited its papers³³. Sabine Fourrier praised the speed and formal quality of that volume, the fruit of a collaboration between the Foundation and the University³³. With Miltiades Hatzopoulos she set the scope of the colloquium "Basileis et poleis sur l'île de Chypre", held on 4 and 5 May 2012; the two noted that the city-kingdoms of Cyprus had not been recognised as equals of the Mediterranean city-states²³. Derek Counts invited her to join him as guest editor of a special issue of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research on the Iron Age polities³⁴.

Between 2003 and 2007 she worked on the project "Deneia: study of regionalism, population and society in Bronze Age Cyprus"²⁵. The Routledge handbook dates the fieldwork to 2003 and 2004, when David Frankel and Jennifer M. Webb of La Trobe University and Iacovou surveyed and excavated a number of looted tombs, documenting some 1,300 tomb entrances and recovering over 1,000 fragmentary vessels¹⁹. She supervised the doctorates of Giorgos Georgiou, Anna Satraki, Elisavet Stephani, Thea Christoforou and Zinon Socratous between 2007 and 2023²⁵. Satraki recalled that Iacovou accepted her as a student in 2002 and, as Satraki came from a classical background, decided to initiate her to pre- and protohistoric research³⁵.

In 2002-2003 she ran the Digital Archaeological Atlas of Palaepaphos, a cultural resources management project²⁵. Fieldwork of the Archaeological Research Unit at Kouklia-Palaepaphos began in 2006, and the University funded a companion pilot project on landscapes under modern development for 2007-2010³. From 2006 to 2024 she was scientific director of the Palaepaphos Urban Landscape Project (PULP) and director of the University's excavation at Palaepaphos-Kouklia²⁵.

The geophysical survey found no definite trace of the city wall assumed to run from Marchello to Hadjiabdoulla, and she asked: "What reason could the royal engineers of the Paphian kings have had to construct an all encompassing city wall around a series of steep valleys?"³. She thought it "more than likely" that the belief in the wall went back to Mitford's first season in 1950³. She later re-examined the interpretation, which Maier inherited from Mitford, of the Marchello rampart as part of a city wall, and proposed that the plateau "may have been the site of a Cypro-Archaic citadel"³⁶.

North of Hadjiabdoulla the excavations revealed a second stone-built edifice, the West Complex, contemporary with the palace and preserved almost 2 m high; by 2019 some 290 square metres, "hardly a fourth" of it, had been exposed³⁶. She reads it as a non-residential investment of the fifth-century kings of Paphos, built at the same time as a fortress of about 500 BC on the Laona hillock³⁶. In the 2019 season on the Hadjiabdoullah plateau an ostrakon was found, which she and Artemis Karnava present as the first evidence of an organised state administration in the Cypro-Classical citadel of ancient Paphos³⁷.

When PULP began, she wrote, nothing was further from the team's mind than excavating a man-made tumulus³⁸. The British expeditions of 1888 and 1950 had identified Laona as an artificial mound³⁸. In 2014, investigating sloping stonework on its east side, the team exposed the inner face of a rampart that stands up to 6 m and is the oldest monument found on Laona³⁹. Building the mound needed at least 9,500 cubic metres of earth, and its construction is provisionally placed no later than the 3rd century BC³⁹. With Marta Lorenzon she published a 2016-2017 analytical study of the rampart's mudbrick architecture, which the two authors treat as a major investment of the royal authorities of ancient Paphos⁴. She argues that Laona, unlike the Salamis tumuli, was not part of a mortuary setting but of a royal programme that shaped a citadel landscape 1 km east of the sanctuary; in 2022 she left open whether it holds a grave³⁸. She directed MEANING, an archaeo-environmental study of the mining and built environment of ancient Paphos, in 2017-2019, and INSIGHT, on the Laona tumulus, in 2022-2024²⁵.

In 2005 she disagreed with the assumption propagated by the 1994 symposium "Cyprus in the 11th Century BC", wrote that the 11th and 10th centuries show "the settled outcome of a fait accompli", and held that mass-produced Aegean-type pottery "cannot qualify as archaeological proof of immigration"⁴⁰. She also rejected attempts, such as Negbi's, to present the Skales cemetery as an ethnic mosaic⁴⁰. Her 2008 article in the American Journal of Archaeology read Iron Age Cyprus through a 1,000-year overview "that focuses on continua rather than breaks"⁴¹. In 2013 she held that modern literature had "unjustifiably increased" the number of Iron Age kingdoms to 12 or even 15⁴².

Fourrier wrote that Iacovou keeps patiently completing her picture of the Aegean migration, and that two of the youngest contributors to the volume, following her, take Late Cypriot IIIB as the beginning of the Iron Age³³. A. Bernard Knapp lists her among the critics of a major migration, and Joanna S. Smith calls her 2007 paper on settlement size "cautionary"^43,44. Henri Trezigny judged her reversed reading of the Marchello fortification, with "internal" towers, to run against the normal practice of Greek fortifications, and her series of fortified acropoleis to be possible but "in no way obligatory"⁴⁵.