Marki cemeteries: Sneddon's survey of Davari, Kappara and Vounaros

Andrew C. Sneddon surveyed the surfaces of three looted Bronze Age cemeteries at Marki, analysed 12,852 sherds weighing 377,420 g, and concluded that a looted cemetery has some, limited, value for questions of chronology, social complexity and burial custom¹. The survey was his doctoral research, under the Australian Cyprus Expedition, with David Frankel and Jenny Webb as co-supervisors; it set out to assess what looted cemeteries are worth to archaeologists and to compare their assemblage with the settlement of Marki Alonia¹.

Fieldwork took place on 13 to 15 November 1998 and from 3 February to 28 March 1999¹. The November trial on the upper tier of Davari used 3 m transects; every artefact was flagged, located with an EDM and described, and nothing was collected¹. In the main season a team of three laid a master grid of 20 x 20 m units, divided into 2 x 2 m contexts, over the middle and lower tiers; artefacts were collected, analysed at the work base and returned to their grid square, and no excavation took place¹. Davari-Kappara, a knoll with seven tombs, and Vounaros, with about 38 tombs, were walked in transects and collected in bulk as single contexts¹. Sneddon treats Davari-Kappara as a separate cemetery, whereas Karageorghis (1958) and Catling (1963) had regarded Davari and Kappara as one necropolis¹.

More than 90 percent of the sherds came from the middle and lower tiers of Davari, 5.5 percent from Vounaros, 2 percent from the upper tier and 1.8 percent from Davari-Kappara¹. Sneddon concludes that Philia tombs lay mainly on the upper tier, that Davari-Kappara was used in EC I-II, and that EC III-MC I tombs were added at Vounaros and on Davari's middle and lower tiers, damaging earlier Philia tombs¹. He finds no evidence of rank, status or prestige in the spatial patterning of the surface assemblage¹. He argues that the mixing of Philia and later sherds does not support the theory that the Philia culture represented elites whose burial areas might have been treated as somehow distinct¹. The artefacts collected from Davari's lower tiers were returned to their grid squares after analysis, and those from Davari-Kappara and Vounaros were scattered evenly across their sites¹.