Glossary Tombs and burial
Shaft grave
Also called: shaft tomb
A grave cut straight down into the ground or rock as a deep, narrow shaft, usually for one or a few bodies and without a dromos.
In Cypriot archaeology the term is used above all for the graves of Late Cypriot IIIA (the twelfth century BCE), when communities at sites such as Enkomi partly turned away from the large family chamber tomb and buried single individuals or small groups in simpler shafts, often within the settlement. The change is read in different ways, from new arrivals to shifts in how families marked their ties to ancestors. Earlier shaft tombs exist too. The bottle-shaped shafts of Chalcolithic Souskiou are among the local precedents for the Bronze Age chamber tomb. See Late Bronze Age Cyprus.
Related terms
- Pit grave
A simple grave dug as a hole in the ground, usually for one body; the normal form of burial in Neolithic and Chalcolithic Cyprus.
- Collective burial
The use of one tomb for many burials made over years or generations, typically by a family or kin group.
- Intramural and extramural
Inside (intramural) or outside (extramural) a settlement or its walls; used above all of where the dead were buried.