Martin Bartelheim

In 2004 a hoard of 34 metal vessels and tools turned up on the hill-top of Kral Tepesi, near Kaleburnu (Galinoporni) in the north of Cyprus, found by people who were not archaeologists. Uwe Müller began a rescue excavation and brought in a team from the University of Tübingen that included the metallurgy specialists Martin Bartelheim and Ernst Pernicka¹. Bartelheim was one of six authors of the hoard's publication in Památky Archeologické in 2008, with S. Behrendt, Bülent Kızılduman, Müller, Pernicka and H. Tekel³.

Lâtife Summerer, a party to the dispute, reports that the Department of Antiquities of the Republic of Cyprus held the dig to be illegal, on the ground that the site had been known since 1962 and the excavation was planned. She writes that Bartelheim was blacklisted by the state archaeology service for supporting the excavation scientifically, and that the University of Tübingen ended its cooperation with the Kaleburnu dig in 2015 after threats to cancel all German excavation projects in the Republic¹. These events are known from her account alone.

His other Cyprus work is in print. Bartelheim contributed "Prehistoric Metallurgy on Cyprus" and "Cypro-Anatolian Connections in the 2nd Millennium BC" to The Northern Face of Cyprus, edited by Summerer and Hazar Kaba (2016)². In 2019 he wrote "Bronze Age Fortifications on Cyprus" with Kızılduman and Müller, a chapter in a volume on Bronze Age fortresses in Europe; it lists Galinoporni-Vasili among the Late Cypriot IIC settlement centres where no fortification had been detected⁵.