Sotira-Teppes: Dikaios's excavations for the Penn Museum

At Sotira-Teppes, Porphyrios Dikaios exposed forty houses of a Neolithic hilltop settlement and divided it into four building phases. He presents it as the first settlement of the Sotira cultural stage to be excavated and published.¹

Porphyrios Dikaios excavated on behalf of the Curium Expedition of the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania (Penn Museum), at the invitation of the Expedition. His services were lent by the Director of Antiquities, A. H. S. Megaw, who also agreed to lend his assistants.¹ The Expedition wanted a prehistoric site near its work at Curium as a complement, and chose Sotira, known to Dikaios from his Erimi report.¹ Its field director was George H. McFadden (spelt MacFadden in the report) and its director B. H. Hill; Froelich Rainey, Director of the University Museum, gave official sanction. The Department of Antiquities was the permit authority.¹ The team included J. S. Last, who prepared the field plan, and Elias Markou of the Department of Antiquities, who did the surveying and final drawing. Kakoulis Georghiou, Senior Museum Assistant at the Cyprus Museum, was foreman, photographer and digger throughout; George Anastasiou, also a Senior Museum Assistant, was foreman at the beginning and later reconstructed many vases. Labourers were recruited at Sotira, and trained excavators came from Episkopi and from Enkomi.¹

Trial trenches and the plateau

The 1947 season was a set of trial diggings to test whether a large excavation was justified. Trenches went into Areas I to IV on the south and south-east slopes: Area I took a trench 18 m by 3 m with architectural remains and two graves, and in Area IV rounded houses over 84 sq m were dug to the topmost floor only. A trial trench 26 m by 2 m crossed the plateau (Area V).^1,2 In the same year Dikaios cleared a tomb in Cemetery A at Sotira-Kaminoudhia, published later as Dikaios Tomb 1.³

Systematic work on Area V began in 1951, on a grid of 2-metre squares expanded on either side of the 1947 trench.^1,2 The zero point stood at 332.25 m above sea level. Once walls and floors were identified, finds were collected by house and floor, with floors numbered from the top and finds between floors kept apart; each floor was surveyed and photographed from a tall double ladder before the objects were removed. Sections were left through the houses and the spaces between them, and a north-south section ran through the whole of Area V.¹

The second campaign, in 1952, uncovered original house floors with combed, red lustrous and red-on-white pottery. Three postholes in most rectangular houses were taken as evidence for a central roof beam.^1,4

The slope graves and the last seasons

In 1954 Area I was reopened over 240 sq m to find more burials and test their relation to the architecture. It yielded a partly destroyed rectangular House 41 and ten more graves, twelve in all with those of 1947. Area V was also revisited for stratigraphical problems.^1,5 The burials were shallow and close to a dwelling; the bodies were tightly contracted, some were covered by heavy stones, and several skulls were recovered in measurable condition.⁵ Dikaios found it more reasonable to assign the graves to a quarter of the settlement on the lower slopes than to a burial ground for the whole settlement; Area V yielded not a single grave.¹

In 1956 Dikaios revisited the settlement for final verification while preparing the report, concentrating on the earliest phase. M. Stekelis studied flints from Sotira and other pre-copper sites for an appendix.^1,6

Phases, dates and the division of finds

Dikaios assigned the forty houses of Area V to four building phases, Phase I being the earliest.¹ The only figure from Sotira is a fiddle-shaped limestone figure (no. 106) from House 5, Floor III, which he assigns to the beginning of Phase II.¹ He describes a sudden disaster that appears to have been an earthquake and brought down the superstructure of almost all the houses; debris was then stacked along the north edge to form a "retaining wall", and Phase IV was a short survival of the settlement.¹ Stanley Price considers an earthquake the most likely cause of subsidence and building collapse.²

Stockholm radiocarbon tests by G. Ostlund on charcoal gave 3500 ± 130 B.C. for Phase I and 3190 ± 130 B.C. for Phase III (St. 337 and St. 350). Dikaios had proposed 3400 to 3200 B.C. on archaeological grounds.¹ Stanley Price prints the two determinations as 3455 ± 110 B.C. (St. 337, H.29, Phase 1) and 3145 ± 130 B.C. (St. 350, H.12, Phase 2).² Stanley Price's analysis combines Dikaios's Phases II and III into a revised Phase 2 and treats Dikaios's Phase IV as revised Phase 3, while judging the overall sequence soundly based.² Papaconstantinou discusses the stratigraphic problems in the publication but follows the four-phase scheme.⁷

The index of catalogued objects in the 1961 report marks each inventory number as assigned either to the Cyprus Museum, Nicosia, or to the University Museum, Philadelphia; the skulls were shipped to Philadelphia.¹ The finds from the 1947 tomb at Kaminoudhia were kept in the Cyprus Museum storerooms.³

Dikaios published the excavation as Sotira (University Museum Monographs, Philadelphia, 1961), with appendices by Angel on the skulls, Stekelis on the flints, Zeuner and Grosvenor Ellis on the animal bones and Dance on the shells.¹ He reports that after the excavations the whole area was expropriated for preservation as an ancient monument, with the remains open to visitors when the report appeared.¹