Pendayia-Mandres: Karageorghis's excavation of the LC I tombs

In 1960 the Department of Antiquities excavated an intact chamber tomb with a short, steep dromos at Mandres, south of Pendayia, holding two successive mass burials of 22 and 12 people¹. The two episodes were separated by a layer of compacted earth, and the report describes bodies deposited in two superimposed layers in each; the assemblage included Middle Cypriot III wares and White Slip jugs and bowls¹. V. Karageorghis directed the work². The same report records a Roman cemetery and a substantial Byzantine settlement at Myloi, between the village and the Mandres site¹.

Karageorghis proposed a date around 1600 BC, at the beginning of Late Cypriot I, for the tomb, and raised epidemic and Hyksos activity as possible explanations for the mass burials, presenting them as questions¹. He argued that the White Slip vessels demonstrated the Cypriot origin of this category, which had often been attributed to Syria, and Dikaios likewise said that the early White Slip and its resemblance to Middle Cypriot painted wares corroborated a local origin^1,2.

Eriksson, discussing the tomb as Tomb 1, treats its lower and upper levels as distinct assemblages³. Eriksson identifies a Phase 1 Proto White Slip bowl in the lower level with late Middle Cypriot III fabrics, and reports 11 Proto White Slip bowls and jugs in the upper level, nine of them Phase 1, along with two further bowls typical of Phase 2³. Eriksson reads this as a development from Phase 1 to Phase 2 and places the material around the MC III/LC IA transition³. Karageorghis's final publication of the necropolis is a chapter in Nouveaux Documents pour l'Étude du Bronze Récent à Chypre (1965)⁴.