Voices from the Grave: A Late Bronze Age Population from Kalavasos and Their Tombs

Alison South presents the 21 Late Bronze Age chamber tombs excavated between 1979 and 1998 at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios by the Vasilikos Valley Project. Located within the eight-to-ten-hectare Late Cypriot IIA to IIC settlement, some tombs were salvaged during construction of the Nicosia-Limassol motorway while others were uncovered in stratigraphical excavations around the ashlar administrative complex, Building X. South examines how local geology, ranging from stable havara limestone to damp, collapsible conglomerate, affected tomb cutting and the preservation of bone and ivory.

Drawing on osteological studies by Jack Moyer and Sherry Fox, which combined the Ayios Dhimitrios remains with those from nearby Kalavasos-Mangia for a sample of 95 individuals, the lecture outlines demography and burial treatment. Infants and children are well represented, placed either in small dromos niches or inside main chambers, and several skulls show evidence of artificial head shaping. South contrasts smaller or disturbed tombs from the motorway and southeast areas, such as Tombs 1, 4 and the intact but modest Tomb 6, where White Slip or plain kraters were found with Base Ring cups inside them as drinking sets, with the large Tomb 18/19/20 complex in the northwest.

The core of the talk focuses on the wealthy tombs under the streets around Building X in the northeast area. Tomb 11, left sealed beneath a 13th-century BC wall, held three young women, a child and three infants accompanied by three matching White Slip bowls. Its grave goods included Mycenaean kraters, a high proportion of Red Lustrous Wheelmade ware spindle bottles, Base Ring bull rhyta, ivory cosmetic boxes and ducks, Egyptian glass, a silver-and-glass pyxis, gold jewellery of standardised weights studied by Elizabeth Goring, and two Cypro-Minoan signet rings. South then covers Tomb 13, built with an entrance ramp and looted at the end of the settlement's life, alongside its sealed subsidiary chamber holding a silver Hittite god figurine, and Tombs 14 and 21, which appear to have been cleared out in antiquity, leaving behind a 54.5-litre Mycenaean chariot krater and matched sets of Base Ring I jugs. She concludes by asking whether the town's international wealth came from olive oil rather than local copper, citing metallurgical and ore studies by Noel and Sophie Gale and Lente Van Brempt.

In the discussion, Peter Fischer compares recent multi-burial tombs and DNA sampling at Hala Sultan Tekke, and Louise Steel and another questioner discuss olive oil exports in Canaanite jars and funerary pottery sets.