Ten rock-cut tombs, most of them Chalcolithic, excavated beside a prehistoric village near Polis

An American team has excavated ten tombs cut into the bedrock of a ridge at Makounta-Voules/Mersinoudia, in the hills north-east of Polis Chrysochous, beside a Chalcolithic village it had partly dug in earlier seasons. The Department of Antiquities announced the results on 11 May 2026. On their shape and the objects in them, it dates most of the graves to the Chalcolithic.

Shafts in the rock

The North Carolina State University team worked on the ridge from 15 June to 17 July 2025 under Dr Kathryn Grossman, with Dr Tate Paulette of the same university and Dr Lisa Graham and Dr Andrew McCarthy of the College of Southern Nevada. The survey of Dr Darius Maliszewski had already located the cemetery, and some cuts showed in the bare rock before digging began. A few tombs had been disturbed in modern times; others had partly slipped down the cliff face.

The Department describes three apparent types. The smallest are round shafts about 1 m across that flare slightly, like a bell, at the bottom. Larger round shafts, about 2 m across, also widen at the base, and a few have a small side chamber, which may have formed through collapse and decay after burial. The third type is a single rectangular pit.

Every grave had been disturbed, and only two still held objects. One gave up dozens of beads of shell, picrolite (a soft green stone), faience and quartz. The other held part of a human skeleton, two copper spirals and broken lengths of copper wire. Unlike the village, whose ground is thick with artefacts, the ridge had almost no surface finds; a large grinding stone and a few sherds lay near one tomb.

Beads from the cemeteryDepartment of Antiquities, Cyprus

Small metal objectDepartment of Antiquities, Cyprus

The village below the ridge

The site lies in the foothills west of the Argaka Dam, on a north-facing slope above the Makounta river, about 2.5 km from the coast and 1 km from the copper mine at Limni [1, p. 109]. The North Carolina team named it Makounta-Voules-Mersinoudia because the settlement spreads over two neighbouring place names [1, p. 109].

Their 2017 survey collected 31,762 sherds. Most of the diagnostic prehistoric pieces were Chalcolithic, and every Chalcolithic sherd that could be dated more closely was Late Chalcolithic. The team also recorded 91 ground-stone tools and 51 pieces of metal slag, which the authors took as a possible sign of metalworking on the spot [1, pp. 109–110]. Petrographic study has matched the main pottery fabric at Makounta to Late Chalcolithic storage jars at Chlorakas-Palloures, north of Paphos, and a model published in March compared the routes between the two villages by land and by sea.

Beside Souskiou

The Department sets the new cemetery against the Souskiou cemeteries near Palaepaphos, finding both likenesses and differences, and treats it as new evidence for how prehistoric Cypriot communities were organised. Souskiou-Laona and Souskiou-Vathyrkakas, excavated by Edinburgh teams from 1992, are described by their excavators as the only known Chalcolithic cemeteries on Cyprus set apart from a settlement [2, p. 468]. Their tombs were cut into the rock, and some were closed with capstones [2, p. 124].

Laona also yielded about 30 faience beads, dated to the second half of the fourth millennium BCE and the earliest recorded in Cyprus [2, p. 479]. Three of them have tin in their glaze, which the excavators read as a sign that the beads, or the copper scale used to make them, came from abroad [2, p. 479]. One Laona tomb held faience beads together with a copper pendant [2, p. 479].

The American Society for Overseas Research, the US National Science Foundation and the university itself paid for the Makounta season.