Uwe Müller

Uwe Müller took the photograph of the Late Bronze Age bronze hoard of Kral Tepesi, in place in its storage jar, after hikers found it in June 2004². The hoard lay in a large pithos on the hilltop near Kaleburnu (Galinoporni) in the Karpas. The finders told the Department of Archaeology and Art History at Eastern Mediterranean University in Famagusta, which informed the Department of Antiquities and Museums of the northern administration. The objects were recovered the next day under its supervision and taken to the St Barnabas Museum near Famagusta, where they are kept². The 2008 publication counts 26 pieces (16 vessels, three offering stands and seven tools) weighing about 15.5 kg; Lâtife Summerer, writing in 2023, speaks of 34 vessels and tools^1,2.

Müller and Bülent Kızılduman wrote the first notice of the site in the Journal of Cyprus Studies in 2004¹. Summerer describes Müller as belonging to the teaching staff of the university, and writes that he started a rescue excavation on the hilltop, involving a team from the University of Tübingen that included the metallurgists Martin Bartelheim and Ernst Pernicka¹. Müller is one of the five authors of the 2008 hoard paper in Památky Archeologické². In 2016 he and Kızılduman contributed a chapter on the site to Lâtife Summerer and Hasan Kaba's The Northern Face of Cyprus, which the editors present as the only excavation of a settlement in the volume³.

The excavation was disputed. Summerer reports that the Department of Antiquities of the Republic of Cyprus, informed of the work only by hearsay, claimed that the site had been known since 1962 and that the hoard was found in 2004 when two German universities began excavating. On that account the dig was planned, not an emergency, and so illegal under international law. Summerer calls the assertion incorrect¹. Tübingen declared the end of its cooperation with the excavation in 2015¹.