Souskiou-Laona: the Edinburgh excavations of the settlement and cemetery

At Souskiou-Laona, the Edinburgh team excavated a Chalcolithic cemetery with a minimum of 203 individuals and a settlement on the ridge about 300 m to the south-west, and set out to treat the two as evidence for the same community.¹

Edgar J. Peltenburg directed the project for the University of Edinburgh and the Lemba Archaeological Project.^1,2 The Abercromby Fund, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and the Russell Trust are named as funders in the preliminary report on the cemetery, and the British Academy, the A. G. Leventis Foundation and the National Geographic Society in the final report.^1,2 Peltenburg described the study of cemetery and settlement together as a relational approach not previously undertaken in Cyprus.¹ The cemetery work also aimed to train archaeology students in excavation and recording of mortuary features.¹

Trial trenches and the cemetery

Before the Edinburgh seasons proper, Souskiou-Laona had been surveyed by Hadjisavvas in 1975 and re-surveyed by the Canadian Palaepaphos Survey Project in 1991, which found finds scattered over 1.4 ha; the Edinburgh authors re-surveyed it in 1999.¹ Trial trenches in 1992, on the eroded slopes, found part of a curvilinear wall of Chalcolithic Building 13, a straight wall and a tool cache, taken as showing intact Middle Chalcolithic deposits.¹

Six seasons, 2001 to 2006, went to the cemetery (Operation C). Lindy Crewe and Sorina Spanou were joint field directors of the cemetery campaign in 2001 to 2003, and Crewe continued as field director to 2006.¹ The outcrop was gridded into 5 x 5 m squares; spoil heaps and tomb fills were sieved through 2 mm mesh and topsoil through 5 mm mesh. Rock-cut features were planned at 1:20 or 1:10, and burial remains in situ at 1:5.¹ In 2001, 42 shaft tombs were investigated. Two small intact tombs held, respectively, a single Red-on-White bowl and segmented faience beads, and about 20 picrolite pendants with dentalium shell beads are reported among the finds.^1,2

The final report records that the cemetery had been extensively looted. Looting attempts were made on three occasions during the six cemetery seasons, and teams camped overnight on site; local informants, via Hadjisavvas 2001, hold that residents of the now abandoned village had looted the site.¹

The report catalogues 158 rock-cut features assigned to Period I and/or Period I/II, plus seven open spaces. The numbering system gave 137 "tomb" numbers, from 101 to 237, though some numbered features were not necessarily tombs.¹ The minimum number of individuals is 203, 117 from intact or largely intact burial layers and 86 from disturbed commingled remains; the report cautions that this is likely an underestimate.¹ Twenty-nine faience beads came from Laona, described as the earliest securely dated faience artefacts from Cyprus.³ Kirsi O. Lorentz argues that the triple burial in Tomb 207 resulted from a single burial episode.⁴

The settlement on the ridge

Full-scale settlement investigation began in August and September 2005 on the Laona ridge, about 300 m south-west of the cemetery, and the report describes settlement operations extending from 2006 to 2011.¹ The settlement occupied a ridge about 1 km long, in five investigation areas (Operations A, B, A/B, D and E), with the surviving evidence severely affected by erosion. The excavators identified 27 fragmentary buildings and possible structures, seven on the West Ridge and 20 on the East Ridge.¹

A 2007 press report describes four weeks of excavation, with terraces cut into the steep hillside for houses, cruciform figurine manufacture waste spread across the settlement, and child burials in a well-built structure at the top of the site.⁵ In 2008, the Department of Antiquities report says, a fifth looted cemetery was located on the West Ridge, and survey there found more fragmentary buildings, among them Building 800 (about 7 m in diameter, with annex Building 915). A dense concentration of picrolite about 100 m beyond them was taken to indicate a workshop for cruciform figurines and large pendants.⁶ In Operation A on the East Ridge, about 2 m of slopewash was removed over about 50 sq m.⁶

The 2009 season lasted four weeks, in April and May. At least five buildings were identified on the West Ridge, three of them in an integrated linear arrangement, and Operation A exposed a sequence of about four superimposed structures. Three radiocarbon dates from Operation B indicated a longer Middle Chalcolithic occupation, continuing into the early third millennium cal. BC.⁷ A stone bowl with a side socket and a ceramic rosette were recovered in Operation A.⁷ In June 2010 the Department of Antiquities announced, as reported by the Cyprus Mail, evidence for figurine production in a house at the settlement, with tools for making the figurines among its remnants.⁸

Sewell interpreted a concentration of picrolite material in the ridge saddle as likely an area of concentrated picrolite working; the report reads the saddle as a domestic space with a high frequency of picrolite processing, not exclusively a picrolite workshop.¹ Of 148 charcoal samples, 16 from the settlement went for AMS dating; 14 gave satisfactory radiocarbon ages, and the chronology combines these with Bayesian modelling.¹

Finds and publication

About 2,000 registered sherds, with complete and near-complete vessels, were handed in to the Kouklia Museum; they comprise selected sherds from Operations A, B, D and E, all sherds from Operation C, all Period III sherds and most Period V sherds. A larger reference collection of Chalcolithic sherds is in storage at the Edgar Peltenburg Archaeological Research Centre in Lemba village.¹

Field seasons ended in 2011, and four further seasons of post-excavation work followed in 2012 to 2015. The final report is Figurine Makers of Prehistoric Cyprus: Settlement and Cemeteries at Souskiou, by Peltenburg, Diane Bolger and Crewe (Oxbow Books, 2019); it directs readers to the unit log and project data held by the Archaeology Data Service.¹