Sabine Fourrier

Sabine Fourrier wrote the catalogue of the small group of finds that came to the British Museum in 1880 from the demolition of the Bamboula mound at Larnaka, and by 2019 she directed the mission that works at Kition^1,3. Neither her date and place of birth nor her training are recorded in the publications that mention her.

In 1998 she was one of four authors of the Louvre's catalogue of its Cypriot terracottas, L'art des modeleurs d'argile, in two volumes, with Annie Caubet, Antoine Queyrel and Frieda Vandenabeele^7,12. Marguerite Yon later wrote that the Louvre figurines had been studied by Fourrier and Queyrel⁹. In 2004 Fourrier published a study of the Archaic coroplastic workshops of Idalion and the spread of their products, in the Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes 34¹¹.

In 2006 she and Antoine Hermary directed Amathonte VI, the volume on the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Amathus from its origins to the early Imperial period^10,16. In 2014, at a colloquium at the University of Cyprus, Hermary was named as director of the École française d'Athènes mission at Amathus and Fourrier as director of the Mission archéologique de Kition et Salamine².

Workshops and kingdoms

Her book La coroplastie chypriote archaïque (Lyon, 2007) sorts Archaic Cypriot figurines into regional workshop groups, among them Idalion, Kition-Kamelarga, Salamis, Amathus and Kourion. Its subtitle, identités culturelles et politiques à l'époque des royaumes, points to the aim: to read the groups for the cultural and political identities of the Cypriot kingdoms^9,13. A 2008 article in the same journal, volume 38, follows the foundation legends of Cyprus and the Hellenisation of the island through the history of scholarship¹⁴. Her 2013 article in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research treats extra-urban sanctuaries in Iron Age Cyprus¹⁷.

She also wrote on pottery from other people's excavations. In the catalogue of the Cypriot collection of the municipal museum of Laon, published in 2010, she contributed a new study of the Iron Age pottery, with attention to its workshops; the collection had been assembled and bequeathed by Paul Marguerite de la Charlonie⁵. In 2011 she wrote chapter 9 of the Athienou Archaeological Project volume edited by Michael K. Toumazou and others, on the Iron Age ceramics of the Malloura sanctuary. She dated the foundation of the sanctuary to Cypro-Geometric III, on 46 sherds of the 8th century BC, and stressed that it stayed in use through the Iron Age⁶.

The Bamboula finds in London

In 2012 she published, with Thomas Kiely, "Excavations at Kition-Bamboula 1879. Finds in the British Museum"¹. Lieutenant H. M. Sinclair of the Royal Engineers had supervised the demolition of the mound in 1879, and the finds reached the museum in 1880 through Earl Granville¹. Kiely wrote the archival introduction and Fourrier the catalogue. She matched the pieces with a photograph taken in 1879, which Max Ohnefalsch-Richter published as a drawing in 1893, and with finds from the later Swedish and French excavations at the site. Several objects visible in the photograph, among them bull protomes and figurines, are now missing¹.

Kition and Salamis

The mission that Fourrier leads began as the Lyon excavation at Salamis, which ran from 1964 to 1974, and took the name Kition et Salamine in 1976³. Yon signed her 2014 introduction as director of the French mission from 1972 to 2007⁴. The year of the handover is not stated, but in 2014 Fourrier was named as director, and Yon wrote in 2019 that the mission's scientific programme was directed by Fourrier^2,3.