William A. P. Childs

William A. P. Childs began the Princeton Cyprus Expedition at Polis Chrysochous, on the northwest coast, and directed its digging at the site of ancient Marion and Arsinoe until 2007¹. He was a professor in Princeton's Department of Art and Archaeology, and by 2012 an emeritus professor¹. His dates of birth and death are not recorded.

Choosing Polis

Childs was a student of Erik Sjöqvist, who had taken part in the Swedish Cyprus Expedition of 1927 to 1931 and later taught at Princeton¹. In the spring of 1980, Vassos Karageorghis, then Director of the Department of Antiquities, suggested that Princeton renew the connection with Cyprus that Sjöqvist had begun. Childs looked at a number of sites with Sophocles Hadjisavvas as his guide and settled on Polis tis Khrysokhou, because everything published from there concerned its cemeteries and nothing the town itself¹.

Survey and excavation

The first season, in 1983, was a survey of the Polis area with Kenneth Hamma of the University of Southern California and graduate students, among them Nancy Serwint¹. It mapped the traces of ancient activity and led to nine trial trenches, running from the Chrysochou river in the west to the Myrmikoph in the east. Karageorghis's report for that year records that the survey found no evidence that Marion lay east of modern Polis². A mission from SUNY Albany under P. W. Wallace worked in the Akamas in collaboration with Childs^2,5. Taxis Stavrou, of the main square in Polis, was the first to sign a permit allowing the expedition to dig on his land, and the mayor, Pavlos Serafides, supported the new expedition¹.

Excavation began in 1984 with an eight-week season. It put two soundings into the town, opened four trenches by the Myrmikoph and cleared the structures at Peristeries. A sounding at a spot strewn with terracottas reached Archaic and Classical layers and a possible naiskos. The team also found an early Byzantine three-aisled church and a Lusignan building containing a hoard of 216 silver coins^3,5. In 1986, a five-week season cleared the Classical sanctuary found in 1984, an 8 by 8 metre building to which a vestibule and stepped entrance had been added, together with the town wall beside it and the narthex of a sixth-century basilica. The chronicle for that year reports very many terracotta figurines, statuettes and statues but little marble, bronze or fine painted pottery, and dates the building to the fifth century BC with a destruction by Ptolemy Soter in 312 BC⁴. The sanctuary and wall are Princeton's area A.H9, at Maratheri¹.

Digging continued until 2007, and study seasons for the final publication followed¹. A conservation system under Christoph von Bieberstein was set up from 1994, and his advanced students joined from 1998; Nancy Corbin served as registrar of the finds¹. The preface thanks the Directors of Antiquities from Karageorghis to Hadjicosti for their support¹.

Childs published the work in a series of reports and studies: a first preliminary report in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus for 1988⁹, an assessment of the stone sculpture of Marion in 1994¹⁰, "The Iron Age Kingdom of Marion" in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research in 1997¹¹, an interim report on 1994 to 1997 in 1999¹² and an account in Near Eastern Archaeology in 2008¹³.

The finds and the exhibition

The finds stayed in Cyprus. They went to the Paphos District Museum, the Cyprus Museum and the Local Museum of Marion and Arsinoe, which opened in 2008 under Dora Matar¹. Joanna S. Smith writes in the 2012 catalogue that no object found at Polis has left the island for Princeton's collections¹.

In 2012 Childs edited, with Smith and J. Michael Padgett, the catalogue of City of Gold: Tomb and Temple in Ancient Cyprus at the Princeton University Art Museum, and wrote its preface, an essay on Marion as a city-kingdom (pp. 91-106) and catalogue entries¹. The exhibition brought together finds from Polis excavated since the nineteenth century, among them the marble kouros dug by Max Ohnefalsch-Richter in 1886¹. The contributors' note in the catalogue still describes Childs as the director of the Princeton Cyprus Expedition¹.