Walter Fasnacht

Walter Fasnacht found the Iron Age copper-working site of Ayia Varvara-Almyras in 1982, during an archaeometallurgical survey connected with the Cornell excavations at Alambra, where a badly damaged furnace was recovered³. Herscher (1995) describes him as of the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum in Zurich¹. He wrote the section "Copper Processing at Ayia Varvara-Almyras" in the Cornell report on Alambra for 1982^5,6.

From 1988 he directed annual excavations and surveys at Almyras by an international team³. By 1997 ten seasons had been completed by a Swiss team from the University of Zurich and the Swiss National Museum; about 70 percent of the site had been excavated, with mining to the west and smelting to the east, in phases from Cypro-Archaic II to the Hellenistic period². Fasnacht himself called Almyras the only complete chain of copper production found in Cyprus, and recorded a reduction furnace (no. 8) about 90 percent intact³.

His team also surveyed the Sia valley for other copper sites from 1988. Sia-Anogia, dated c. 400-300 BC, produced at least 1,000 tonnes of slag³. The Sia-Mathiatis-Agia Varvara survey of 1995-96 found two well-preserved furnaces at the edge of the Sia-Mathiatis mine². Preliminary reports appeared in the Report of the Department of Antiquities between 1989 and 1996⁷. In 2018 he is named as a collaborator on the final publication of Almyras, edited by Christina Peege with Philippe Della Casa⁴.