Vassiliki Kassianidou

Vasiliki Kassianidou, known as Lina, excavated a copper slag heap at Politiko-Phorades and later put the bronzes from the Salamis necropolis through a portable X-ray fluorescence analyser. She took a bachelor's degree with distinction at Bryn Mawr College in 1989 and a doctorate in archaeometallurgy at University College London in 1993¹⁴. Thomas Kiely lists her among the Cypriot scholars who trained at UCL⁵.

She joined the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Cyprus in 1994 and was promoted to professor in 2013¹⁴. In 1997 she is recorded at the University of Cyprus¹; by 2003 she was Associate Professor in its Archaeological Research Unit³, and in September 2015 she opened a workshop as Professor and Director of the Unit⁴. She directed the Unit from 2015 to 2019 and was President of the Board of Trustees of the Cultural Foundation of the Bank of Cyprus from 2014 to 2016¹⁴.

Politiko-Phorades

A primary smelting site was identified at Politiko-Phorades in survey in 1996. In 1997 A. Bernard Knapp and Kassianidou conducted the first excavation season there, after a geomagnetic survey¹. The site is a slag heap lying in an old channel of the Kouphos river, with over 2,000 kg of slag and about twenty tuyeres; charcoal dated by AMS to the 12th to 10th centuries BC, while the sherds were of Middle Cypriot III to Late Cypriot I date¹. Excavation continued until 2000, directed by Knapp of Glasgow and Kassianidou of the University of Cyprus².

With Michael Given, Knapp and Jay Knoller, she was a founder of the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project, whose results were published in 2007⁵.

Analysing Cypriot metalwork

In 2013 she published a study of metal resources and the copper trade in the age of the Cypriot city-kingdoms in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research⁹. With G. Papasavvas she edited Eastern Mediterranean Metallurgy and Metalwork in the Second Millennium BC (2012)¹¹, and with Demetrios Michaelides and Robert Merrillees she edited Egypt and Cyprus in Antiquity, the proceedings of a conference held in Nicosia in 2003¹⁰. In 2016 she published a chapter on metallurgy and metalwork at Enkomi that revisited the excavations of Porphyrios Dikaios¹².

She coordinated the Marie Curie network NARNIA. Under it, Andreas Charalambous analysed copper-alloy artefacts from excavations of the Department of Antiquities, most of them directed by Vassos Karageorghis. The material came from tombs at Limassol, from Enkomi and Pyla, and from Palaepaphos Skales and Plakes. From the Salamis necropolis, 548 metal pieces were analysed by portable X-ray fluorescence and 169 others could not be analysed⁶. The chapter that she and Charalambous wrote on the Salamis metalwork is dedicated to Karageorghis. It also notes that the earliest analyses of Cypriot metal were those Augustus Franks presented in Stockholm in 1874, of bronzes he had bought from Luigi Palma di Cesnola and given to the British Museum⁶.

For Cyprus and the Balance of Empires (2014) she analysed a brass dish of the Middle Byzantine period, from a hoard found about 1960 near St Sophia in Nicosia and kept in the collection of Andreas Pitsillides, using the Unit's new portable XRF instrument⁷. In 2025 she contributed a chapter on the mining industry and Cypriot archaeology in the British colonial period, "Mining in the archives", to Empire and Excavation, edited by Kiely, Reeve and Crewe⁸.