Kourion: the Amathus Gate cemetery excavations (Parks)

Six phases of use between the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods were identified in the cemetery by the Amathus Gate at Kourion, among them about 29 chamber tombs of the 1st to 3rd centuries CE, dumping after the 370s earthquake, and 24 excavated cist tombs of the late 4th to 6th centuries¹. The Amathus Gate cemetery was excavated over six seasons from 1995 to 2000¹.

Setting up the project

Danielle A. Parks directed the work from 1995 to 2000¹. It began in 1995 at the request of Demos Christou of the Department of Antiquities under the sponsorship of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute². Christou issued the original permit, and his successors Flourentzos, Hadjisavvas, Hadjicosti and Solomidou-Ieronymidou renewed it¹. Funding came from the University of Missouri-Columbia and Brock University among others, and the American Schools of Oriental Research is listed as a sponsor¹.

The final authors say Parks conceived the project in the mid-1990s as a way to understand the whole city through its cemetery¹. Its formal aims were to reconstruct the main phases of the Roman cemetery and to study mortuary customs, including the pagan to Christian transition, along with biological relationships and pathology, the funerary landscape, and trade networks¹. Herscher, writing in 1998, gave the excavators' aim as clarifying the layout and organization of the cemetery and defining its relationship to the city². Excavation of individual tombs went together with mapping and survey of the wider funerary landscape². Michael Given directed a survey of the whole cemetery in the 1996 and 1997 seasons¹.

The seasons, 1995 to 2000

Fourteen cist graves were excavated in 1997. Although the tombs had been looted, they yielded gold, silver and bronze jewellery, bone hairpins, a bronze mirror, lamps and coins; channels were cut in the rock around tombs 1 and 5, and libation pipes accompanied some of the tombs³.

In 1998 two areas were excavated, Area A beside the Amathus Gate and Area B just to the south⁴. Area A produced the first intact sealed cist tomb. It held at least two inhumations, two gold rings, a gold hoop earring, ivory bracelet fragments, seven bronze coins, a gold solidus of Constantine II, glass vessels and a lamp, with a charred vase over it and a libation pipe beside the head⁴. A second cist tomb, in Area B, contained a minimum of eleven individuals, three gold earrings, bronze and bone pins, a bronze coin and a cooking pot⁴.

In 1999 work concentrated on Area A. It uncovered Hellenistic-Roman chamber tombs, a quarrying platform taken down to bedrock, fresco fragments in trench AV and a circular lime kiln abutting the Acropolis rock⁴. Chris Mavromatis was site supervisor in 1999 and 2000¹. The fresco and plaster moulding fragments may have come from a decorated chamber tomb or reception building⁴. The last season, in 2000, completed the kiln and found a plastered stone platform with a cut shelf nearby, possibly a votive shrine, and a 3 m stretch of the city fortification wall⁴.

Dating and reading the evidence

Reporting Parks, Herscher gave the chamber tombs as running from the Hellenistic period to at least the early 3rd century AD, with contiguous rock-cut tombs that had arcosolia and pillows, some with libation pipes². Quarrying followed, which Parks proposed may have been connected with rebuilding after the late 4th-century earthquake, and then the cist tombs, dated to the late 4th or 5th century or later mainly by lamps². The cist tombs had headrests and encircling channels, and two uncompleted cist blanks appear to Herscher to support the idea of professional tomb-cutters². Parks as reported by Steel suggested that the lime kiln, which is later than the cist tombs, dates after the Arab invasions of AD 688⁴.

The final authors place extensive dumping particularly after the 370s earthquake, continuing until before about 1250 CE¹. They count human remains of at least 73 adults and 62 subadults from the cist tombs¹. Neutron Activation Analysis of cooking and fine wares identified two exchange networks and a local Kourion cookware industry¹.

Publication

Preliminary reports of the six seasons appeared in Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus between 1996 and 2001. Five study seasons followed from 2001¹. Parks died in 2007 before synthesizing the material, and the team continued the analysis; the final authors state that much of the interpretation in the preliminary reports is superseded¹. They report mixed stratigraphy and legacy records that were hard to integrate¹.

The final report is City and Cemetery: Excavations at Kourion's Amathous Gate Cemetery, Cyprus, in two volumes of 2024 in the AASOR series: volume 1 (AASOR 76) on context, analysis and conclusions, and volume 2 (AASOR 77) on the human skeletal remains, ecofacts and artifacts^1,5. The tombs are visible from the tourist road to the city site, which the authors say was bulldozed through the area in modern times¹.