Khirokitia: the Department of Antiquities excavations under Dikaios

At Khirokitia, on a hill between the 30th and 31st milestones of the Nicosia-Limassol road, Porphyrios Dikaios uncovered round houses, which he called tholoi, standing on either side of a stone 'main road' traced over some 185 m¹. The work ran from 1936 to 1946 for the Department of Antiquities, with Dikaios, Curator of the Cyprus Museum, directing throughout¹. In his foreword Megaw, the Director of Antiquities, called it the Department's principal enterprise from 1936 to 1939 and the first time it entered the field of excavation on a par with leading foreign expeditions, and wrote that no single prehistoric site in Cyprus had been investigated on a comparable scale¹.

Finding and planning the site

Dikaios was searching for how widely the early culture first met at Erimi was spread in Cyprus, and noticed Khirokitia in the course of that search of early sites¹. George Anastasiou, Senior Museum Assistant, was his companion in the discovery and excavation of the settlement¹. Limited funds ruled out trial trenches across the hill, so Dikaios chose the south slopes, which he judged the most convenient area for expansion by the first settlers, and went on from there¹. The Government of Cyprus and the British Academy contributed to the cost, as did a private donor, George Eumorphopoulos^1,2.

Each area was divided into squares of 2 m sides; finds were recorded by square and depth, finds inside a tholos by floor, and finds between tholoi by depth¹. Because there were no distinct superimposed settlement strata, individual tholoi were excavated independently from top to bottom, with lower levels reached by soundings and in Area VI¹. Dikaios was virtually single-handed in the digging, recording every object and burial with a limited labour force¹. From 1938 the programme aimed first to study the structure and stratigraphy of individual tholoi and second to lay bare as large a continuous area of the settlement as possible, so as to study the town plan¹.

The campaigns

The first season, in March 1936, lasted one month; a trench cut through the large tholos IA in Area I, and by the end the whole of that tholos and some surrounding remains were exposed¹. In May and June 1937 Area I was completely uncovered, showing tholoi on either side of a straight wall-like structure later identified as the main road, and trenches higher up the hill followed it to the highest slopes¹.

In April to June 1938 the team uncovered Areas IIA-III and IV and the eastern part of Area V, following the main road; tholos XVII and the large tholoi XIX and XX were found¹. J. S. Last surveyed in 1938–9 and made the site plan and general plan¹. The 1939 season, in April to June, was the last before the war. It investigated Area VI, east of Areas IIA-IV, where small superimposed tholoi and tholos XXVII lay, and excavated tholoi XLV (I) and XLVII at the west end of Area V; XLVII held an exceptional number of burials¹.

The war stopped excavation, but a short period in June 1943 was used to uncover the main road from the north-west end of Area V to the northern edge of the saddle¹. The fifth campaign, from May to August 1946, was supplementary: a long season with a limited labour force that laid bare and investigated tholoi III, V, X (I-IV) and XV (I-III) in Area I, with re-examination of details for the publication¹. Kakoulis Georghiou was expert digger and photographer¹. Dikaios numbers the 1946 work the fifth campaign, while Swiny and Le Brun count six campaigns between 1936 and 1946^1,3,4.

The settlement as Dikaios read it

Dikaios held that the main road was built in two stages and that the settlement grew on both sides of it¹. Along the west side of the road on the saddle runs a row of tholoi of the type of tholos XLVII, almost entirely preserved apart from the vaulted part¹. Soundings on the northern slopes found tholoi and a wall that may continue the main road or be a by-road; the northern and eastern slopes were otherwise left unexcavated, and large parts of the settlement remain undug¹. Le Brun argues that later excavation gave a quite different picture of the linear stone structure Dikaios read as a main road with simultaneous east and west sectors⁴; that work is described under the French mission.

In Dikaios's summary, tholoi of the first period were mostly small, with a mud-brick or pise dome on a low masonry base. In the middle period solidly built small and large tholoi appeared, together with a multiple type of main tholos with two smaller kitchen and workshop tholoi round a walled yard¹. The dead, adults and children, were buried contracted in graves within the tholoi, with one extended; graves were generally single, and some double burials in the upper floors he explained as reuse. Women more often than men received stone bowls, mostly broken, and necklaces of dentalium shells and picrolite or carnelian beads were found on women¹. Dikaios saw a developed stone-vessel industry, with almost no pottery in the first two periods, as the most striking characteristic of the culture; well-made pottery, above all combed ware, appears in the third and last period¹.

Dating

Dikaios tentatively assigned the culture to 3700–3400 B.C., on about 300 years of occupation for a deposit of c. 4 m and on foreign parallels such as Arpachiyah, and called these dates largely conjectural¹. Stanley Price reports that after radiocarbon dating of aceramic samples Dikaios's fourth-millennium estimate was revised upward to the mid-sixth millennium, and that Dikaios then explained the pottery as a fourth-millennium reoccupation⁵. Three of the radiocarbon samples were submitted by Dikaios (St-414, St-415, St-416), from deposits his excavation had left exposed⁵. Stanley Price treated them with four from his 1972 sounding as a homogeneous group with a median of 5495 bc, dating the floruit of the site to about 5500 bc⁵.

Publication and the site today

Dikaios published Khirokitia: Final Report on the Excavation of a Neolithic Settlement in Cyprus in 1953 (Oxford, for the Government of Cyprus), with appendices on the flint by Stekelis and Waechter, human remains by Angel, mammal bones by King, shells by Wilkins and petrology by Manglis¹. The finds were inventoried at the Cyprus Museum with the help of Dikaios's wife, who accompanied him at the excavations¹. Papaconstantinou finds the description and presentation of the stratigraphic sections problematic, with discrepancies and omissions, though finds were recorded by floor⁶. Dikaios states that at the end of the work the excavated areas were expropriated and enclosed, the exposed remains were consolidated, the site was scheduled as an ancient monument and a custodian was appointed¹.