Idalion-Platia: Department of Antiquities rescue of the Iron Age necropolis

The rescue excavation of the Platia cemetery at Idalion in 2011 and 2012 recorded 56 Iron Age tomb groups, adding significantly to the roughly 100 tombs excavated at Idalion¹. The tombs run from Cypro-Geometric to Cypro-Classical, the vast majority Cypro-Archaic¹. Construction of a road linking Dali and Potamia led to the dig, and the Department of Antiquities had known the site since at least the 1950s, when a letter to the then Director, Porphyrios Dikaios, reported a tomb found in the Platia fields by Symeon Klonaris¹. The Director of the Department entrusted the excavation to Anna Satraki¹. Platia is a flat stretch below the hills Ampileri and Moutti tou Arvili, north of the acropolis, and is now heavily built over on the eastern outskirts of Dali¹.

Only about half the tombs were chamber tombs with a dromos; the rest were shallow shaft graves, which were hard to delineate because they were filled with extremely hard soil¹. The chambers were small to medium, squarish with domed roofs, and even the smallest usually held more than one inhumation¹. Pottery was deposited in large numbers; bronze vessels and ornaments, stone or bone beads and terracotta figurines were rarer¹.

Locus 20, dug in December 2011, was an isolated pit at the northeastern edge of the excavated area: an elliptical or irregular shaft, at most 170 by 120 cm and about 80 cm deep, with offerings on a thin ash layer¹. It held 49 objects, 48 vessels and one stone object, possibly a spindle-whorl or bead. The vessels were mainly White Painted table-ware, cooking vessels, five Phoenician imports and one Tell el-Yahudiyeh Ware jug, L20/34¹. Anna Georgiadou, Artemis Georgiou and Satraki date the assemblage to the very end of Cypro-Geometric II, the late 10th century BCE¹. No skeletal remains, human or animal, were found, and the authors do not associate the pyre with a cremation. They argue that the pit combines an offering pyre, feasting and libation, and the deposition of an antique artefact, which they take to be the jug¹.

The Locus 20 study appeared in 2024 in The Topography of Ancient Idalion and its Territory, edited by Stephan G. Schmid and Will M. Kennedy². The full publication of the necropolis is planned by Satraki and Georgiadou within the ANR-DFG KIT project¹.