Kalavasos-Tenta: the Vasilikos Valley Project excavations

In 1979 the excavators at Kalavasos-Tenta cleared the central pier of a round Neolithic building, Structure 11, and found a red-ochre painting on its east face. Ian A. Todd presented it as the only evidence of wall painting in all prehistoric Cyprus¹. Its southern section was detached, conserved in Nicosia by the Department of Antiquities and put on display in the Cyprus Museum¹.

Five campaigns on the hill

Tenta lies on a small natural hill on the west side of the Vasilikos valley, in the village lands of Kalavasos, with a view from the Troodos to the sea². Vassos Karageorghis, Director of the Department of Antiquities, drew Todd's attention to the site in 1975³. Todd directed the work for Brandeis University and the Vasilikos Valley Project, with funding from the National Science Foundation³. The first campaign ran in July and August 1976 and began a field survey of the Vasilikos valley; the settlement was measured at about 190 by 130 m^3,4. Four further campaigns followed, in 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1984, with none at Tenta between 1980 and 1983^5,6.

The project's major aim was to retrieve data on all aspects of life in the valley in the Neolithic, and the survey was meant to put Tenta in the context of the valley as a whole². Todd also named the chronological sequence of the Cypriot Neolithic as a main archaeological problem³. A grid of 10 m squares was laid out in 1976; excavation squares were 4 m on a side with 1 m baulks, and deposits were dug by stratigraphic sequence³. All deposits were sieved except calcrete layers, and from 1977 a fixed amount of every deposit was floated for botanical samples³. Frank Koucky began geological analyses in 1977³.

Round buildings and an enclosure

At the top of the site stood a stone circular house of limestone and diabase, enclosed by two outer concentric walls around areas apparently open to the sky². Beneath it lay an earlier large circular mud-brick building with white plaster floors bearing red colouring, and below that a heavy stone wall of a third phase^2,7. East of the summit were oval or curvilinear mud-brick structures on low stone footings, some with one or two internal piers and plastered wall faces; their interiors were almost empty of artefacts^2,7. Structure 35 held ochre-stained stone tools and worked red ochre, which suggested ochre working, and Structure 34 held many stone vessels⁷.

On the south slope the excavators dug the circular stone houses Structures 9 and 10, with burials under their floors, and Structure 27, a circular mud-brick building with internal piers^3,8. Structure 42 was a well preserved house with two internal piers, a plastered bench and a cut window⁷. The curvilinear wall first dug in 1947 in Dikaios's excavations was followed on the south slope; it stands about 1 m high and may have been the outer wall of the settlement in one phase, with a ditch cut in the natural just outside it^7,8.

The 1984 season set out to trace that wall round the summit, test the stratigraphy under the east-summit buildings and finish Structures 9 and 11⁵. The wall turned up in two places east of the summit, and a deep ditch with a circular Structure 92 beside it was found on the lower south-east slope⁵. Soundings under Structures 39, 28 and 76 found earlier remains in each, and post-holes below the earliest architecture east of the summit were read as a possible lighter first phase or a timber palisade⁵.

Burials and finds

Burials 1 and 2 were contracted adults in separate pits on opposite sides of Structure 9, and Burial 4 held several infants in two levels of a shallow pit against the wall of Structure 10³. In 1979 five skeletons without grave goods, Burials 6 to 10, turned up in different parts of the site¹. In 1984 an intact child skeleton (inhumation 11) lay under the late floor of Structure 9 with a heap of worked red ochre; a rudimentary examination suggested artificial cranial deformation⁵. Inhumation 12 was a set of disarticulated bones of at least two individuals in a large hollow near the ditch⁵.

The artefacts include 136 stone vessels from excavation and surface collection, eight obsidian pieces from two seasons (an Anatolian source was thought likely) and eighteen worked bone objects, mostly points³. Botanical remains showed cultivated emmer and einkorn wheat and lentils². The 1979 faunal sample of 1,081 identified items was about half deer, 30 per cent pig and 20 per cent caprines¹. On the lower slopes, strata of Ceramic Neolithic and mainly Early Chalcolithic date held pits and hearths but no architecture⁹.

Dating the village

Eight radiocarbon samples from 1976 were run at the University of Pennsylvania. Five of the usable ones fall between 5160 and 5480 B.C. (uncorrected), and two fall at 6530 and 6400 B.C.; Todd could not accept those two and dated the aceramic occupation to the second half of the 6th millennium B.C.³. Clarke and Wasse describe Todd as first taking the village to be probably broadly contemporary with Khirokitia. They argue that, after the discovery of a pre-Khirokitian Neolithic horizon, Tenta has been completely recontextualized, with a main occupation in the mid to late 8th millennium cal BC⁶. Peltenburg and colleagues proposed in 2001 that the top-of-site settlement is Cypro-LPPNB, and compared its hierarchical layout with PPNA Jerf el Ahmar¹⁰.

Publication and the site today

Todd published preliminary reports for 1976 to 1979 and the two final volumes, Excavations at Kalavasos-Tenta, Volume I in 1987 and Volume II in 2005^11,12. Croft notes that his animal-bone report, completed in 1987 and published in 2005, was not revised to take account of the new chronology¹³. In 1994–95 the Department of Antiquities built a glulam-and-PVC shelter over the site, replacing a partial metal roof and adding a suspended walkway for viewing it from above¹⁴. Herscher anticipated public opening in 1998¹⁵.