Vounous 1999 Overview

Bellapais-Vounous, Cyprus
Anne-E. Dunn-Vatori

Vounous is the name of a low hill overlooking the sea on the north coast of Cyprus. It is situated one and a half miles east of the Abbey of Bellapais, which is one of the chief tourist attractions of the island. The site, located in the northern foothills of the Kyrenia range, is a large prehistoric Bronze Age cemetery. Vounous was initially mentioned by Professor Gjerstad under the heading Kasafani. Its tombs were looted in the early 1930's and the Department of Antiquities was alerted of the sale of Red Polished vases at Kyrenia. Porphyros Dikaios, Curator of the Cyprus Museum, undertook the rescue excavations at Vounous in 1931-1932. P. Dikaios uncovered Tombs 1 to 48 in the western part of the site. In June 1933, Claude F. A. Schaeffer, representing the National Museums of France, excavated Tombs 49 to 79 in the same area, in collaboration with P. Dikaios (Fig. 2).4 An expedition of the British School at Athens, directed by James R. Stewart, continued the excavations in 1937-1938. Tombs 80 to 164 were uncovered at both sites A and B.5 All of them conducted unsuccessful field research around the site in order to find a settlement connected to the necropolis.

In 1956, Professor JR. Stewart obtained an agreement from C.F.A. Schaeffer to undertake the publication of his (Schaeffer's) excavations at Bellapais Vounous as the report in extenso remained unpublished. The documents from Schaeffer's season available to JR. Stewart and his student, R.S. Merrillees-who completed his Archaeology III thesis on "Vounous Tombs 49 to 79" in 1959 at Sydney University - were comprised of the manuscript notebooks restricted to the contents of the tombs, photographs of the tombs, and Schaeffer's book Missions en Chypre. It was only a few years later, in 1961, that more documents - and not the least: in situ plans and sections drawn by Dikaios and prepared for publication, and Dikaios's notebooks all in pencil - on the 1933 excavations were given to them. These important sources of information implied a revision of R.S. Merrillees' thesis that he never brought to the state of publication, encouraging "any qualified student or scholar to finalize this long overdue undertaking" .