Nancy Serwint

Nancy Serwint is the Princeton Cyprus Expedition's specialist on the terracotta sculpture found at ancient Marion, the city beneath modern Polis Chrysochous. She joined the project in 1983, as a graduate student, and in 2012 was its assistant director¹.

Polis Chrysochous

Princeton's work at Polis began in 1983 with a survey of the area by William A. P. Childs and Kenneth Hamma and graduate students that included Serwint. Excavation started in 1984 and ran until 2007, followed by seasons devoted to study¹. By 2012 she was an associate professor of art at Arizona State University¹.

Her share of the finds was the terracotta sculpture from two Cypro-Archaic sanctuaries near Polis, Peristeries and Maratheri. In the 2012 essay on the sanctuaries of Marion she is credited with that material, writing alongside Joanna S. Smith, who covered Peristeries, and Mary Grace Weir, who covered Maratheri¹. The Peristeries sanctuary had been under investigation since 1988, and Smith's 1997 report on it cites two of Serwint's earlier papers².

"The Terracotta Sculpture from Marion" appeared in 1991 in the proceedings of the first international conference of Cypriote studies⁹, and "The Terracotta Sculpture from Ancient Marion: Recent Discoveries" followed in 1992 in Acta Cypria 3¹⁰. In 1993 she published a single statuette, "An Aphrodite and Eros Statuette from Ancient Marion", in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus¹¹. A colossal statue from Marion was the subject of her chapter in the 2000 Festschrift for Hans-Günter Buchholz¹². In 2009 she wrote on ethnicity and cross-cultural exchange at Marion in the shadow of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, the expedition of 1927 to 1931, in a volume on its finds¹⁴.

Her doctoral dissertation, completed at Princeton in 1987, concerned Greek athletic sculpture⁷. She was also one of four authors of the fifth preliminary report of the Polis-Pyrgos Archaeological Project, covering the 1999 to 2001 seasons, with Maliszewski, Joanna S. Smith and Walker; it appeared in Thetis in 2003⁶.

Director of CAARI

From 1995 Serwint directed the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute in Nicosia. She followed Stuart Swiny, who had held the post from 1980 to 1995³. In the autumn of 1998 the institute's newsletter reported that she would leave after four years and return to Arizona State⁴. The next issue gave her term as ending on 30 June 1999, with Robert Merrillees taking over as director on 1 July⁵.

In 2002 she and Diane Bolger edited Engendering Aphrodite: Women and Society in Ancient Cyprus, published as CAARI Monograph 3 and ASOR Archaeological Reports 7¹³.