Stuart Swiny

Stuart Swiny directed the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI) in Nicosia from 1980 to 1995. During those years the institute excavated the Early Bronze Age settlement of Sotira-Kaminoudhia, a project Swiny later published. He succeeded Ian A. Todd, who had followed Anita Walker as director after the institute's founding in 1978¹.

In 1972 he and John C. Overbeck published Two Cypriot Bronze Age Sites at Kafkallia (Dhali), volume 33 of the Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology series¹⁵. In 1978 he led Kent State University students in a survey of nine Early and Middle Cypriot sites in the Episkopi region, at Anoyira, Evdhimou, Erimi and Paramali. The survey found that all but Erimi-Kafkalla had been abandoned by the end of the Middle Cypriot period⁵. The same report connects him with the Kent State work at Episkopi-Phaneromeni led by James R. Carpenter⁵.

Directing CAARI

Under Swiny the institute bought the library of Schaeffer, offered Fulbright fellowships from 1984, and moved into its own building in central Nicosia, inaugurated in June 1991^1,2. In 1985 he visited Eve Dray Stewart in Australia. She chose CAARI as the beneficiary of her gift, and the money from the sale of the Tjiklos site helped buy the building²³.

In 1980 Lt Brian Pile reported a site on the Akrotiri peninsula to Swiny, who invited archaeologists to examine it, among them David S. Reese, who studied the bones. Alan H. Simmons first saw the place in the summer of 1985 and excavated it in 1987, 1988 and 1990^9,10. This was Akrotiri-Aetokremnos, the pygmy hippopotamus site; Swiny was not its excavator. In 2001 he edited The Earliest Prehistory of Cyprus as CAARI Monograph 2, which carries chapters by Simmons, Todd and others¹³.

Sotira-Kaminoudhia

The first season at Sotira-Kaminoudhia, in 1981, lasted four weeks with ten diggers and served as a test of whether the site justified large-scale excavation⁶. A second season followed in 1983, with a research project directed by George Rapp under CAARI⁷. The third and last, in 1986, was funded wholly by the Institute for Aegean Prehistory and completed the rooms of Area A⁸.

Swiny reported the radiocarbon chronology with Sturt W. Manning in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology in 1994¹⁸. The final publication, Sotira Kaminoudhia: An Early Bronze Age Site in Cyprus (CAARI Monograph 4, 2003), was edited by Swiny, Rapp and Ellen Herscher¹⁶. Swiny wrote the settlement chapter and the chapter on metal, and wrote the cemetery chapter with Herscher^19,20.

Later work

In 1997 he directed the Sotira Archaeological Project, a pedestrian survey of the Kourion chora covering about 154 square kilometres from the Kouris valley to Paramali. It found little development of the hinterland in early periods and a peak in Roman and Late Roman times¹¹. He published it with Chris Mavromatis in Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus for 2000¹⁹.

He also helped Norma Kershaw and Vassos Karageorghis with the 1983 exhibition and catalogue of Cypriote antiquities at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota²⁴, and wrote the foreword to the 1991 Nicosia reprint of Luigi Palma di Cesnola's Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples¹⁴. He became professor at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where he directed the Institute of Cypriot Studies. In 2013 the CAARI director thanked him for 35 years of involvement as he completed a term as trustee²².