Pamela Gaber
Pamela Gaber is an archaeologist who trained in Israel in the 1960’s. She has been working in field archaeology ever since. She joined the Joint American Expedition to Idalion, Cyprus, in 1972 as a graduate student. In 1976 she was put in charge of the University of Connecticut Field School by Co-director Anita Walker. Pamela continued in that role for 3 seasons.
Having earned her doctorate in Ancient Art and Archaeology at Harvard in 1982, Dr. Gaber received the permit to run her own excavations at Idalion in Cyprus in 1987 when she was teaching at the University of New Hampshire. She began digging in the monumental structures on the West Acropolis and the private houses in the Lower City. In 1992 the dig affiliated with the University of Arizona (where Pamela was then teaching) and continued working in the ‘Lower City.’ In 1992 the “Adonis Temenos” was located on the East Acropolis and intensive excavations were undertaken there until 2012.
In 2003 the Idalion Expedition began to be sponsored by Lycoming College in Pennsylvania. The City Sanctuary in the area known as the ‘Lower City South’ has been intensively excavated since then. In addition to numerous articles on archaeology and identity, articles about the iconography of ancient goddess worship, connections to ancient Israel, landscape archaeology, and a book on Cypriote Sculpture, Dr. Gaber has published excavation reports on Idalion and co-edited a conference volume about the influence of the environment on ancient sites in Cyprus. The volume publishing the excavations of the Adonis Temenos on the East Acropolis is due out in 2026. The final seasons of the American Expedition to Idalion are occupied in removing ‘baulks,’ the meter-wide soil left between trenches to facilitate team movement and stratigraphic reckoning. This work is uniting the architectural remains from trench to trench so that the visitor will be able to envision the huge sanctuary as a whole, including its many similarities to ancient Israelite sites.
Presenter at
Bible & Archaeology Fest XXVIII, November 21 thru 23, 2025
Cyprus and the Bible
The island of Cyprus is only 110 miles from Israel. It’s no surprise then that there was extensive contact and sharing for many, many years. In fact there are features of these two cultures that show similarities from the beginning of the first millennium BCE down to the Hellenistic era. Most of these are revealed through the study of material culture, but in later periods the texts lead us on a quest to find the footsteps of biblical players.
