Olivier Pelon

Olivier Pelon examined the domed tombs at Enkomi during the 21st campaign of the French expedition in October and November 1970, when C. F. A. Schaeffer was still general director. Two vaulted tombs in the centre of the town were under study, and their relation to the Aegean tholoi of the second millennium BC, at Crete and Mycenae, still had to be settled¹. Jacques Lagarce worked the wells and cisterns of the same area¹.

By March 1971 the chronicle of excavations in Cyprus prints the report "submitted by the director of the French mission, M. O. Pelon"². In the campaign of 15 March to 10 April he opened a new site in the quarter west of the "Temple Area" explored by Porphyrios Dikaios. One sounding of under 40 square metres held seven robbers' pits; it also gave last-phase floors, twelfth-century pottery and bronze arrow and spear heads, and no copper-working installation although slag occurred at every level. Under his direction the built tombs were cleaned for publication². The 23rd campaign, in September 1972, was also under his direction, with work in quarters 4 W and 6 W³. Nicolaou describes the expedition as headed by Professor Olivier Pelon, who had taken over from Schaeffer⁴. Sources differ on the handover: the Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East gives Pelon the leadership from 1971 to 1973, while Nicolaou dates it from 1972^5,7.

His own publications were "Les tholoi d'Enkomi", printed in 1973 in the acts of the Nicosia symposium on the Mycenaeans in the Eastern Mediterranean (pp. 245-253), and Tholoi, tumuli et cercles funeraires, on circular funerary monuments of the Aegean Bronze Age (Athens and Paris, 1976)⁸. He co-signed preliminary reports in Syria with Elisabeth and Jacques Lagarce⁹. His birth and death dates are not recorded. The 1974 war ended the expedition's work at Enkomi.