Psematismenos-Trelloukkas: the Department's cemetery excavation

The cemetery in plot 449 at Psematismenos-Trelloukkas gave 47 tombs of the beginning of the Early Cypriot Bronze Age, and no settlement remains were preserved with them¹. Giorgos Georgiou, Archaeological Officer of the Department of Antiquities, directed a trial excavation there from April to June 2008, after the owner asked to develop the plot, a listed ancient monument (Schedule B)¹. A later review calls it an eight week campaign².

The tombs were of chamber, small chamber and shaft type, and the 2008 report dates all of them to Early Cypriot I-II; Merrillees notes that Tomb 121 (2008) seems to have been used into Early Cypriot II-III^1,2. Lorentz gives the cemetery an approximate date of c. 2300–2200 BCE³. The tombs were entered in the Larnaka District Museum catalogues as Tombs 80–126¹. Merrillees describes the cemetery as the most extensively excavated burial ground of Early Cypriot I-II known from the central south coast, with hundreds of artefacts, among them one of the largest arrays of complete or near complete vessels from any site of the period². Webb and Frankel report 659 vessels from the 47 tombs, and copper objects including two spearheads in three of the largest tombs⁴. Twenty-nine tombs produced human remains, 27 of them chamber tombs and two pit tombs; Lorentz notes that no physical anthropologist took part in the excavation³.

In July 2009 Georgiou excavated plots 15 and 16, which abut plot 449 to the east on a steep slope and belong to a group declared ancient monuments in 2007 for preserved Early and Middle Bronze Age settlement remains; he found neither a settlement nor a cemetery⁵. Portable EDXRF analysis of pottery from the cemetery was done in the Larnaca District Museum in May 2010, while the material was being prepared for publication⁶. Jennifer M. Webb and David Frankel of La Trobe University collaborated on the study of the finds². The final volume, Psematismenos-Trelloukkas. An Early Bronze Age Cemetery in Cyprus, by Georgiou, Webb and Frankel, appeared in Nicosia in 2011 and is reviewed by Merrillees^2,7.