Vassiliki Kassianidou

According to Wikipedia, she was born in London on 26 October 1967 and grew up in Nicosia²¹. The Financial Mirror gave her age as 55 in July 2023²⁰. She studied at Bryn Mawr College, where she took a double major in chemistry and Classical and Near Eastern archaeology and graduated cum laude in 1989¹⁸. She then took her doctorate in archaeometallurgy at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, in 1993^18,22. Thomas Kiely names "Dr Lina Kassianidou at the University of Cyprus" among the scholars from the island who studied at UCL and went on to become distinguished⁵.

Kassianidou joined the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Cyprus in 1994 as a lecturer in Environmental Archaeology and Archaeometry¹⁸. A note of 2001 calls her an Assistant Professor there since 1994²². She is listed as Associate Professor in a volume of 2012 and was promoted to Professor in 2013^18,23. From June 2015 to August 2019 she directed the university's Archaeological Research Unit^18,20. She also served as vice-chair of her department and as a member of the university senate²⁰. In May 2023 she was elected Dean of the Faculty of Letters²⁰.

The sources disagree on when Phorades was found: a caption in the 2001 excavation report dates her photograph of the site "at the time of its discovery" to 1995, while the Archaeology in Cyprus survey for 1987-1997 says the primary smelting site was identified in survey in 1996^1,22. The same survey reports that in 1997 Bernard Knapp and Kassianidou ran the first season of excavation after a geomagnetic survey of the site¹. The Bulletin de correspondance hellénique chronicle for 1997 lists the work of the University of Sydney survey programme as directed by B. Knapp of Glasgow and L. Kassianidou of the University of Cyprus²⁴. In 1998 the work, directed by A. B. Knapp, M. Donnelly and L. Kassianidou, concentrated on Area A, where the archaeometallurgical remains lie, and again produced large quantities of slag, tuyeres and fragments of furnace lining²⁵.

In her own account, Phorades was a joint project of the University of Glasgow and the University of Cyprus, and its field directors were Mike Donnelly and Paul Duffy²³. The figures for the slag differ from report to report: the first season was said to have yielded more than 2,000 kg of copper slag and some 20 near-complete tuyeres; the survey of 1997-2000 gives more than 3.5 tons of plano-convex slag over three seasons; and Kassianidou in 2012 gave three tons in all, with hundreds of furnace and tuyère fragments and more than 50 almost complete examples^1,19,23. Analyses of the slag pointed to small-scale primary smelting that produced around 300 kg of copper¹⁹.

The date of the workshop also changed between reports, for after the first season AMS dating of charcoal suggested the 12th to 10th centuries BC¹. The 1997-2000 survey reports two calibrated radiocarbon dates out of five samples, one of the 12th to 10th centuries BC and one of 1680-1410 BC¹⁹. In 2001 Knapp, Kassianidou and Michael Donnelly placed the workshop in the middle of the second millennium BC, with pottery of the earliest Late Bronze Age, about 1600 BC, which made it in their words "the earliest primary smelting workshop yet excavated on Cyprus"²². Kassianidou wrote in 2012 that a series of radiocarbon dates falls within the 16th and 15th centuries BC²³. In 2001 she was at work on the final publication of the excavation²².

The Troodos Archaeological Project, an international multidisciplinary programme run jointly by the University of Glasgow and the University of Cyprus, was launched in June 2001 under the direction of V. Kassianidou, J. Noller of Oregon State University and A. B. Knapp²⁶. Its fourth and fifth survey seasons, in 2003 and 2004, were directed by Michael Given and Knapp, Kassianidou and Noller²⁷. In 2004 she published a paper on recording the mining history of Cyprus through archaeological survey²⁸. Four years earlier the Italian magazine Le Scienze had reported that Vassiliki Kassianidou had for some time been nursing the idea of making the island's mining heritage better known, with a mining tour that would take in Mitsero and Mathiatis on the northern slopes of the Troodos²⁹.

Kassianidou has written that Jim Muhly laid the foundations for the study of copper production in Cyprus³⁰. She and George Papasavvas edited the papers of a conference held in Nicosia on 10-11 October 2009 in honour of James D. Muhly, organised by her department and the Archaeological Research Unit, as Eastern Mediterranean Metallurgy and Metalwork in the Second Millennium BC²³. With Muhly she also wrote a paper on copper and iron in Crete and Cyprus from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age³¹.

Her chapter of 2011 restudied a pot bellows in the Pancyprian Gymnasium Museum, at a time when only five such pot bellows were known from Cyprus, to throw light on four sherds from Phorades³⁰. Because the only known examples of the bridged-nozzle type come from Cyprus, she wrote that "it may be suggested that this is a local type"³⁰. Christopher Davey notes that she proposed a different sequence for Cypriot pot-bellows, linking the Pancyprian Gymnasium piece to Phorades; he remarks that she did not discuss the origin of the proposed Phorades pot-bellows and that none suggests itself from his own evidence, and he counts Phorades, with a "maybe", among smelting sites where pot-bellows are absent³².

Her paper of 2012 on Enkomi returned to the metallurgical workshops that Porphyrios Dikaios found in Area III, and she credits his "meticulous work" for letting later scholars restudy the material²³. Comparing the finds with Phorades, she concluded that the Enkomi workshops were not extracting metal from ore, and she disagreed with Lindy Crewe, who had questioned the importance of the copper industry in the early Late Cypriot period²³. On iron, a chapter in The Mediterranean Context of Early Greek History holds against Kassianidou's work of 1994 that iron was first produced on Cyprus as a by-product of copper production³³.

In 2013 she turned to the Iron Age, reviewing the exploitation and control of the island's metal resources by the Cypriot kingdoms and trying to tie the evidence to particular kingdoms by its nearness to their capitals⁹. She called that review "only a prelude to a much-needed detailed study"⁹. Maria Iacovou noted that the paper confirms that most calibrated dates for copper-working come from the first millennium BC³⁴. In a paper of 2016 on Iron Age Kition, Kassianidou argued that the Cypriot kings needed copper to reinforce their military power on land and sea and that Kition wanted copper mines of its own; she granted that the Bamboula sanctuary assemblage "offers little support" but held that the whole of the data made the picture clear³⁵. She ended it by calling it "high time" to study Iron Age copper production and trade as the Late Bronze Age had been studied³⁵.

She coordinated the Marie Curie training network NARNIA, under which Andreas Charalambous began a project on Cypriot metalwork whose objects came only from Department of Antiquities excavations, mostly those of Vassos Karageorghis; in a chapter they dedicated to Karageorghis, she and Charalambous report that 548 copper-alloy artefacts from the necropolis of Salamis were analysed⁶. Her appendix on a Middle Byzantine dish in the A. Pitsillides collection reports that analysis with a portable XRF showed it to be of relatively pure brass, like that used by contemporary smiths of the Islamic world⁷. With Athos Agapiou and Sturt W. Manning she studied Skouriotissa, worked extensively in antiquity and the only active copper mine on Cyprus, whose earlier landscape the open-cast mine has almost obliterated³⁶. The authors recorded a slag heap exposed by a new road in 2016, and they conclude that the Cypriot copper industry was at its height in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine period, in the fourth to seventh centuries AD³⁶.

Harvey S. Mudd began collecting Cypriot antiquities after he became president of the Cyprus Mines Corporation in 1916, and he exported the collection under licence from the Antiquities Department in 1930^37,38. In 2017, as director of the Archaeological Research Unit, Kassianidou emailed the president of Harvey Mudd College, Maria Klawe, about researching the objects³⁷. The talks ended in the decision to give all the items to the University of Cyprus, announced at a ceremony on 11 December 2018 at which she spoke and called the collection's copper oxhide ingot "extremely important for the history of Cyprus"³⁷. The sources give different sizes for the collection: the college gave more than 200 items in 2018, and a report of December 2024 gave 266 antiquities handed over in December 2024^37,38.

Kassianidou was a member of the Cyprus National Commission for UNESCO from 2014 and President of the Board of Trustees of the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation from 2014 to 2016¹⁸. In 2018 the Council of Ministers appointed her to the board of the National Board of Research and Innovation, and in 2022 she was elected a Corresponding Member of the Archaeological Institute of America¹⁸. She became the third Deputy Minister of Culture on 11 July 2023, and since 1 July that year the Deputy Ministry had taken in the Department of Antiquities²⁰. At her swearing-in on 14 July she promised to make that transfer "smooth and efficient"³⁹. As Deputy Minister she received the 266 Mudd antiquities, among them a rare copper talent, in Claremont in December 2024, and said they would be catalogued and delivered to the University of Cyprus for teaching, with the talent and other important pieces included in the planning of the new archaeological museum³⁸.

She is the daughter of Gloria Kassianides, owner of the oldest art gallery in Cyprus, and is married to Yiorgos Papasavvas, Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cyprus; they have two sons²⁰.