Pamela Gaber

Pamela Gaber has worked at Idalion (modern Dhali) since 1972, and the sanctuary that Robert Hamilton Lang dug and called a temple of Apollo was found again under her direction. She also published as Pamela Gaber-Saletan. In her own account she trained at Harvard in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures and went to Idalion that year as a graduate student¹.

The American Expedition

In 1972 she directed probe trenches in the almond grove below the West Acropolis, opened by Lawrence E. Stager and Anita Walker to find Lang's temple. They found a Roman road, not the temple¹. The expedition's first search, she writes, hit a Roman villa bath house, and a correction of about 225 m to the compass bearing, worked out by Stager, then led it to the Hellenistic administrative centre¹.

The staff list in the expedition's final publication names her field supervisor in 1976 and Associate Director in 1977 to 1979². The Chronique for 1978 calls her the Harvard deputy director of the eighth campaign (June and July 1978, West Terrace), with Walker and Stager as co-directors³. The 1989 volume lists her with Stager, Walker and Graham on the West Terrace report, with Walker on the West Lower City domestic precinct, and as author of a chapter on regional styles in Cypriot limestone sculpture². Her book on the Idalion sculpture appeared in 1986 under the name Gaber-Saletan as Regional Styles in Cypriote Sculpture: The Sculpture from Idalion¹¹.

Her own excavations

In 1987 she received a permit from the Department of Antiquities, whose director was Vassos Karageorghis, for one exploratory season under the University of New Hampshire^1,4. Soundings on the West Acropolis terrace showed that the North Building predates 600 BCE, earlier than the c. 500 date proposed by Einar Gjerstad. A fire in Building B in the Lower City, which held an olive-oil press, proved to be local¹.

From 1992 the University of Arizona Expedition worked under her direction, and in that year reported with Margaret Morden¹⁶. It found the steps and temenos of the complex on Moutti tou Arvili that Lang had dug. Lang's site had been placed on a plan by Max Ohnefalsch-Richter and then missed by the American Expedition's first search¹. Gaber and W. G. Dever published it in 1996 and 1998, and she reads it as a sanctuary of the Wanax, later of Adonis^14,15. The Department of Antiquities' own work at Ambelleri was by Maria Hadjicosti from 1991¹.

The expedition passed to Lycoming College in 2001, where she is Professor of Archaeology and Judaic Studies¹. In the Lower City her teams recorded industrial installations, among them oil pressing and clay levigation tanks in use from the 13th century BCE into the Roman period. A levigation tank found in 1995 had been reused as a deposit of votives, mostly Cypro-Archaic, and was fully excavated by 1998. In 1998 work to the south found the Sanctuary of the Divine Pair, with standing stones and altars with ash pits¹. With Georgia Bonny Bazemore she published two inscriptions from Idalion in 1999¹⁷.

The Department of Antiquities annual report for 2008 records the Lycoming College season, with 32 participants, and the report for 2009 records the Lower City South season^7,8.

Beyond Idalion

In 2003 she co-authored, with the geomorphologist Benoît Devillers and Nolwenn Lécuyer, notes on the Bronze Age settlement at Kakoskalin near Ayios Sozomenos, found in deep-cut tests directed by Devillers^1,18.

In 1997 and 1998 she spent considerable time at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota studying its Cypriote collection with Pamela Russell and Murray McClellan. The museum has a complete inventory and photographic record of the collection from that work⁶.