Kissonerga-Ammoudhia and Choiromandres: rescue of nineteen chamber tombs

Between 26 July and 9 August 2000 Eustathis Raptou of the Paphos District Museum excavated 19 rock-cut chamber tombs at Kissonerga, in a plot being built over with holiday apartments^1,2. A team of volunteer students from the Lemba Archaeological Project worked with him¹. The first tombs found had been largely destroyed by bulldozers; later ones were dug carefully but under severe time pressure, and no complete plans of the tombs or of their relation to each other exist¹. Graham places the plot in Kissonerga-Ammoudhia, while the Chronique notice summarised by Steel names Choiromantres^1,3.

The tombs were small, subcircular or ellipsoidal, each with a small entrance dromos and partly damaged³. The pottery was black polished, red polished and coarse ware; finds included stone beads, picrolite amulets, bronze earrings, a bronze spearhead and two whetstones³. Tomb 6 was the best preserved: a shelf held a burial in situ, a second burial had intact vessels, and the tomb contained a picrolite pendant, a chert blade, at least 119 stone beads and a whetstone, with at least 153 vessels¹. Tomb 16 held at least 126 vessels, among them an RPIII juglet and a Red Polished Black Topped bowl, which Graham counts as the only two clear imports of the assemblage¹.

Finds from the 2000 and 2008–09 excavations are held partly in Paphos and partly in the Cyprus Museum, Nicosia, and the 2000 human remains were at the Paphos Museum¹. Graham, who took no part in the excavation, wrote her tomb descriptions from notes supplied by Raptou¹. She argues from the ceramics of both excavations that the cemetery was used from the very early Early Cypriot period through Middle Cypriot II-III, and radiocarbon dates on teeth from Tombs 1, 10 and 16 fall within a 400-year span of the Early and early Middle Cypriot¹. She notes that further tombs may survive beneath modern buildings and agricultural land¹.