Lapithos: the Swedish Cyprus Expedition

Tomb 313 at Lapithos held an estimated 26 burials, 133 bronze weapons and tools, and a Red Polished plank-shaped idol.^1,2 It was one of 23 tombs that Erik Sjöqvist excavated at the Bronze Age cemetery of Vrysi tou Barba for the Swedish Cyprus Expedition in the autumn of 1927.¹

Vrysi tou Barba

Einar Gjerstad organized and directed the expedition, and Sjöqvist was in charge of the archaeological work at Lapithos.¹ The mayor, Kyrios Kaplanis, helped obtain the landowners' consent and lodged the expedition.² Work began at the end of September 1927 and ran to the end of November at Vrysi tou Barba, a Bronze Age necropolis along the shore west of the village.¹ The report says the dig started near the earlier excavation area, to obtain a representative series from a limited area.¹

The tombs are numbered 301–323.¹ The report assigns Tomb 302 to the beginning of Early Cypriote II.¹ Heavy rain flooded the dromos and chamber of one tomb during excavation, which disturbed the original stratigraphy and left the find levels inconclusive as to relative dates.³ Sjöqvist's synthesis tabulates the burial groups by phase from Early Cypriote II A to Middle Cypriote II B, and notes that in the area investigated the burial ground was in frequent use through Early Cypriote II and III but little in Early Cypriote I and Middle Cypriote I and II.¹

Tomb 313 had repeated interments in niches and on the chamber floor.¹ Keswani cites it in discussing collective secondary burial and its group's wealth.⁴ Tomb 301C was a single rich burial with 3 knives and 2 hook-tang weapons, one of them 63.6 cm long, in Keswani's description of the material.⁵

The expedition read Tomb 322 as two tombs joined end to end, an earlier southern part and a later northern part.¹ An inscription in its dromos read A. A. 1913, evidence of earlier activity at the tomb.¹ Tomb 322B held a horse skeleton and paste beads, among them a necklace of white spherical beads in a symmetrical composition.¹ Talalay and Cullen cite the 18–24 year old woman from Tomb 322B, buried with bronze weapons, spindle whorls and a horse, as a case where osteological determinations have sometimes overturned gender attributions made from grave goods.⁶ Fischer notes that, taking the sword, dagger and knives as personal gifts, the sex determination would make Tomb 322 the burial of a "female warrior".⁷

Kastros and the small groups

From November to mid-December 1927 the expedition moved to Kastros, an Iron Age necropolis below the plateau of Anastasia, and returned there from the beginning of March to the end of April 1928.¹ The report calls it a rock-cut necropolis that had never been explored archaeologically, though some tombs had been plundered in Byzantine times, and numbers the expedition's tombs 401–429.¹ The report's synthesis divides the tombs into Cypro-Geometric I, II and III, with early and late stages within those periods.¹

Gjerstad interpreted some of the dromos burials as human sacrifice.⁸ Steel does not accept this uniformly: she argues that the dromos of Tomb 412 was reused after the chamber burial, and she treats the sacrifice interpretation of Tomb 422 as uncertain.⁸

Three tombs, 601–603, were dug at Plakes within the area examined for the Neolithic settlement.¹ The report assigns the first burial period in Tomb 601 to the end of Cypro-Geometric I and a later period to the early part of Cypro-Geometric II.¹ Tombs 701 and 702 at Kylistra are included in the report's account of that necropolis.³ A week of trial-digging on the upper village and the Ajia Anastasia plateau found no intact tombs of the periods sought; two tombs earlier dug by Menelaos Markides were re-recorded as 501 and 502.¹

The Neolithic settlement

Gjerstad dug the settlement at Alonia ton Plakon himself, from the beginning of October to the middle of November 1928.^1,9 Trial pits and a trench identified the area, and the eastern and western parts of the settlement were excavated in two-metre squares.¹ In the western area the report records four huts, one above another, in successive culture strata, and reads them as four habitation periods within the same broad epoch.¹ It assigns the western settlement to the end of the fourth millennium BC and gives no absolute date for the eastern one.¹ The report calls the settlement Neolithic, while Herscher and Gjerstad's 1980 memoir call it Chalcolithic.^1,2,10

Finds and publication

Finds went to the expedition's central deposit in Nicosia for registration, cleaning, restoration, classification and description.¹ They were then divided between the Cyprus Museum and the excavators. Which Lapithos objects went to which side is not recorded.¹ For the whole expedition about 18,000 finds were recovered, of which about 12,000 (65%) went to Sweden.¹¹ The Lapithos work is published in volume I of The Swedish Cyprus Expedition (1934), and volume III (1937) holds tomb catalogues and illustrated object registers.^1,3

Before 2016 the Vrysi tou Barba area had been used as a rubbish dump, and nothing of the old excavations was visible; the site is unfenced.¹¹