THE EMBEDDED STELLAR POPULATION IN NORTHERN NGC-6334

JHK imaging photometry is reported of an area of approximately 2' x 3' centred on the far infrared source NGC 6334 I with limiting magnitude s J = 18.3, H = 17.8 and K = 16.2. More than 224 sources were detected in K-band, increasing by a factor of more than seven the number of ob jects found in previous near-IR surveys. Most of the sources are locat ed in an area of about 3500 square arcsec centered around the massive young stellar object Irs1, which ionizes the compact HII region NGC 63 34 F. The location of these sources and the analysis of the colour-col our and colour-magnitude diagrams suggest the presence of an embedded and young stellar cluster of size similar to 70 '' (0.6 pc), and stell ar density of about 1200 pc(-3). The star formation efficiency is esti mated to be SFE similar or equal to 0.25. Only a few of the most lumin ous stars of the cluster were found to show large near-IR excesses but this may be due to the non-detection, at the shortest wavelength, of the majority of the highly reddened cluster members. The extinction of the region is very variable with a maximum of A(V) > 70 in Irs2 while the average is < A(V) > similar or equal to 40. Very close to the pos ition of an H2O maser associated with NGC 6334 I(N), a contracting cor e at an earlier evolutionary stage, we found six very red sources, one of which is a small and diffuse nebula seen only at 2.2 mu m. Finally , the older and developed HII region NGC 6334 E was found to be probab ly ionized by a small cluster of at least 12 B0-B0.5 ZAMS stars