Dhenia: the Department's emergency excavations under Kyriakos Nicolaou, 1960

In 1960 the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus carried out emergency excavations at two cemeteries near Dhenia, with Kyriakos Nicolaou in charge; soundings at Kafkalla and work on a mound at Mali brought out tombs of the Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age^1,2. Kafkalla lies south-west of the village and Mali south-east of it¹.

At Deneia-Kafkalla the soundings aimed to locate tombs and to determine the periods that marked the beginning and end of the cemetery's use¹. Many tombs were identified, most of them reportedly looted long before the excavation. The pottery included Philia-phase Red Polished and painted wares, which the report assigned to about the 23rd century BC, together with material from later Early Bronze Age and Middle Bronze Age phases¹. One tomb was intact. Its earliest burial layers belonged to the Early and Middle Bronze Age and were disturbed when the tomb was reused in the Late Bronze Age. Two layers of dried-mud rubble had been added inside the chamber before the final burial. White Slip and Base Ring pottery was recovered, complete or in fragments¹.

At Deneia-Mali the work centred on a mound covering tombs¹. Two intact Early Bronze Age tombs were found. One was a shallow pit with two linked circular cavities, holding mostly small incised Black Polished bowls; the report suggests it was a child's burial. The other was a deep, large circular pit containing large Red Polished vessels and a large bronze dagger¹. Dikaios's survey of 1959 to 1961 summarises the Dhenia work as a rudimentary chamber grave with Philia-stage pottery at Kafkalla, a chamber tomb with superimposed Middle Cypriote and Late Cypriote burials, and Early Cypriote chamber and shaft graves and Late Cypriote tombs at Mali².

The work was reported in V. Karageorghis's Chronique des fouilles et découvertes archéologiques à Chypre en 1960 and in Dikaios's Archaeology in Cyprus, 1959–61^1,2. Webb and Frankel later placed the Dhenia cemeteries within a heavily damaged Bronze Age cemetery complex and argued that systematic study of tomb architecture and residual pottery could recover archaeological information from a damaged cemetery³.