Karmi: the Australian (Melbourne) excavations

In the spring of 1961 an Australian party working at Karmi-Palealona uncovered a standing human figure carved in relief on the dromos wall of Tomb 6, 116 cm high and 30 cm wide, beside the entrance to the chamber¹. On the last day of digging the same party opened an unlooted Middle Cypriot tomb, 11B, which held a Cretan Kamares ware cup^2,3.

The director was J. R. B. Stewart, then Edwin Cuthbert Hall Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology at the University of Sydney³. The annual notices and the preface to the final publication name the University of Melbourne as sponsor^4,5. Powell adds that the University of Sydney paid the salaries of university staff while funds went into a Melbourne Cyprus Expedition Fund². Permits came from the Department of Antiquities². Stewart asked Dikaios for a wide permit covering an area rather than one site; within a week of arriving he applied for Karmi-Lapatsa, and on 1 March 1961 for Palealona, where six landowners gave permission².

The 1961 season

The expedition set out to explore two Bronze Age cemeteries at Palealona and Lapatsa⁵. According to Powell, the party had come to investigate the earlier phase of the Bronze Age on the north coast, and Stewart described the season as partly a training dig for his research assistant and secretary². Work began at Lapatsa on 27 February and ended there on 24 March 1961, with Palealona dug in parallel for several weeks². Powell writes that Stewart found Lapatsa, opened first, disappointing, in part because many of its tombs had water damage and the layout of the tomb entrances was confusing².

Stewart was ill throughout, and Eve Stewart did much of the fieldwork; she drew site plans at each tomb and kept an 8-mm film and film log of the dig, not all of which was usable². Stewart hired a Cypriot foreman, Tryphon Koulermos, and local labourers². At Lapatsa the workforce was twelve labourers, a donkey man and a night watchman². Yiannis Kleanthous represented the Department of Antiquities; his relatives owned the land at both sites³. The team also included Betty Cameron, Stewart's personal assistant, Robert Merrillees, his research assistant, and Derek Howlett, technical assistant of the Nicholson Museum^2,3. Robert Deane, who had trained under Emery in the Sudan, was shocked when Stewart laughed at his request for a dig book².

Tomb 6 and the seafarer's tomb

Powell tells that the Tomb 6 relief was found while Stewart was on site, and that Dikaios, at first sceptical, visited the next day². Tomb 6 also has relief pilasters and a stomion facade carved with three panels, each topped by a band of incised Vs¹. Webb and Frankel describe the figure as the only relief carving known from Early Bronze Age Cyprus; Karageorghis in 1962 had reported a rough relief of a human figure, with the facade carved to represent a house^1,5. Webb and Frankel see small breasts and a swelling in the pubic area, while Powell says archaeologists today believe the figure is a man^1,2. Webb and Frankel list earlier readings of the figure as an image of the deceased, a person paying homage to the ancestors, and the Cypriot Great Goddess¹. Webb and Frankel read the tomb as a possible mortuary shrine, and Webb later calls it the earliest Bronze Age ritual facility identified on the island^1,6. Webb and Frankel note that the tomb had been looted, but its remaining assemblage included three of the finest decorated bowls found at Karmi¹.

Karageorghis and Dikaios dated the tomb with the Kamares cup to Middle Cypriot I, about 1800 to 1750 BC^4,5. The final publication dates the cup, from Tomb 11B, the "tomb of the seafarer", to Middle Minoan II, and Steel's review lists a spearhead and a faience bead among its funerary furniture^3,7. Stewart believed that the cup, by linking a datable Cretan period to an undated Cypriot one, solved the chronological problems of the whole Near East². Tomb 6 itself was long dated to Middle Cypriot I, but Webb and Frankel place its construction, use and closure entirely within EC I-II¹. Steel summarises the final publication as placing Lapatsa earlier, with tombs cut in EC I-II, and Palealona in use from EC II into MC II-III⁷. Karageorghis reported good-quality Red Polished pottery from both cemeteries⁵.

Dividing the finds

A plaster cast of the Tomb 6 figure was made at the end of the season by a conservator sent from the Cyprus Museum, and the figure was damaged in the process². Webb and Frankel note some damage during excavation¹. Stewart raised funds for a protective shed over the tomb². The finds from Lapatsa Tomb 1 and Palealona Tombs 6 and 11 stayed in the Cyprus Museum; the rest went to Australia³. The party sailed with over seventy packing cases of artefacts, housed first at Stewart's property at Bathurst, then at Eve Stewart's house at Wentworth Falls, before transfer to the Nicholson Museum, where much was still being accessioned when the final publication appeared^2,3. By then 11 tomb groups had been dispersed to other institutions³.

Karageorghis wrote that no fuller report or photographs could be had after Stewart's death⁵. Stewart's field notes are reported lost⁷; Merrillees's diary entries from the excavation were made available to the final publication team³. J. M. Webb, D. Frankel, K. O. Eriksson and J. B. Hennessy published the two cemeteries in 2009 as The Bronze Age Cemeteries at Karmi Palealona and Lapatsa in Cyprus, Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology 136³.