Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios Tomb 11: An Intact Late Cypriot Chamber Tomb Under the Town

The tomb turned up two days before the 1984 season at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios was due to close, and the season was extended to dig it (Goring 1996). In the mouth of a low doorway at the north end of a rectangular pit stood a stone slab. It covered only part of the opening. Behind it a young woman lay on a rock-cut bench with gold at her ears and neck, the bones of two more women were heaped on the bench opposite, and the floor between them, under a thin skin of silt, was crowded with pottery.

Ayios Dhimitrios had at least twenty-one tombs scattered among its streets and buildings, and most had been robbed, many of them while the town was still lived in. Tomb 11 is the only intact, sealed tomb group from the site (Knapp 2008, p. 213, citing South 2000, p. 353). Elizabeth Goring, who published its burials and jewellery, was blunt that the tomb itself was ordinary (Goring 1989, p. 98). Late Cypriot chamber tombs of its size and shape are common. Intact ones recorded with modern methods are rare, and in Tomb 11 the jewellery was still on the body and the order of events could be read from where the bones lay.

Its date rests on the pottery. The Mycenaean vessels belong to the style archaeologists call LH IIIA2, which puts the main funeral in Late Cypriot IIA:2; Goring gives about 1400–1375 BC (Goring 1996), and the last deposit may run into LC IIB. The full publication of the tombs, announced as volume 71:4 of the series Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, has not appeared. What follows draws on the reports by Goring, on Priscilla Keswani’s study of Cypriot burial (Keswani 2004, pp. 114–115), on Alison South’s papers on the site as summarised by Bernard Knapp, and on C. J. Moyer’s study of the bones (Moyer 1989, pp. 64–65, as reported by Goring and others).

Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios lies in the Vasilikos valley, a few kilometres from the south coast and downstream from the copper mines of the Kalavasos area. In the 13th century BC it was a town of about 11.5 hectares. At its centre stood Building X, an ashlar building some 30.5 m square with a hall of great storage jars, pithoi, for something like 33,500 to 50,000 litres of olive oil (Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, “Kalavasos”). Clay cylinders inscribed in Cypro-Minoan, the undeciphered script of Late Bronze Age Cyprus, were found in the town. Around 1200 BC it was abandoned.

A street ran north to south along Building X’s west wall, and Tomb 11 lies under it. It is the northernmost of four tombs, 11, 14, 13 and 21, laid out in a line beneath the same street, and these four held the richest burials at the site (Knapp 2008, p. 211, citing South 1997, p. 161, and South 2000, p. 348). Diane Bolger reads the row of tombs and the building as a planned alignment (Knapp 2008, p. 211). Tomb 11 shares Building X’s orientation, yet it is fifty to seventy-five years older, and the people who built the street and the building did not cut into it (Goring 1996). Whether they knew exactly what lay under their feet, the excavation cannot say.

Burying the dead inside the town was not unusual on Late Bronze Age Cyprus. At Maroni ashlar buildings went up over earlier tombs; at Episkopi-Bamboula and Alassa tombs were cut under streets. Keswani calls this the “privatization of the ancestors”: families keeping their dead within the property they controlled (Keswani 2004, pp. 87–88, via Knapp 2008, p. 212). At Ayios Dhimitrios the street came two or three generations after the dead beneath it.

In the model the street surface is about 0.9 m above the crown of the chamber ceiling, and the wall of Building X stands about 0.8 m east of the chamber’s east side. Both distances are our estimates, as are the street’s width and the depth of rock over the tomb. The other three tombs of the row are drawn only as ghosted outlines to the south, in schematic positions.

Mourners reached Tomb 11 by climbing down into a rectangular pit cut in the rock, the dromos. The same pit served a second, much smaller tomb: at its south end, directly opposite Tomb 11, a cupboard-like chamber of less than a square metre was given its own number, Tomb 9 (Goring 1996; Keswani 2004, p. 114; Knapp 2008, p. 212). A small niche cut into the pit’s east wall held more bones. Tomb 13, further south under the same street, has the same arrangement, a large chamber off the north end of a pit and a small one off its side, which supports reading Tomb 11’s chamber as lying to the north.

The doorway into the chamber, the stomion, was a “small port-hole opening”, less than a metre high, reached by three rudimentary steps, and Goring remarks that getting in “could never have been easy” (Goring 1996). A blocking stone was still in place when the tomb was found, but it covered only part of the opening. The steps could lie in the doorway passage, leading down into the chamber, or in the pit, leading down to its floor; Goring’s description does not settle which. We put them in the passage.

The published accounts give none of the pit’s dimensions. The model makes it 3.1 m long, 1.4 m wide and 2.05 m deep, with a doorway 0.7 m wide and 1.00 m high at the crown of its arch, and a slab of local stone 0.9 by 0.75 m, 15 cm thick, leaning against the opening and leaving a gap at its west side. All of these are our estimates, sized to fit the published description.

The chamber measures 4.39 m wide, 2.81 m long and 1.78 m high (Goring 1996; Osterholtz 2015, p. 222). It is wider than it is deep. The width runs across the doorway, east to west, because the room is bilobate: two rounded lobes sit side by side, divided at the back by “a small buttress of uncut rock” projecting from the north wall. Along the west and east walls the cutters left two “substantial” benches of rock standing, about the same height, the western one noticeably longer and wider than the eastern, and each “bed-sized” (Goring 1989, p. 98; Knapp 2008, p. 212).

The bench sizes are not published. Ours are 2.1 by 0.9 m on the west and 1.8 by 0.7 m on the east, both 0.50 m high. The woman found on the west bench stood 158.8 cm tall (Moyer 1989, pp. 64–65, via Smith 2018), and the west bench had to take her at full length. The ceiling profile is also unrecorded; we give each lobe a low dome rising to the published 1.78 m, by analogy with Tomb 14, also bilobate, and that shape is speculative. The rock is drawn as the soft, pale calcareous marl under a hard crust of kafkalla that Late Bronze Age tombs in this valley are generally cut into, by analogy.

No tools were reported from the tomb. Chambers of this kind were cut with bronze picks or chisels and stone hammers, the spoil carried out in baskets, and the model shows short parallel pick marks on the walls on that analogy. Our estimate of the work: about 17 m³ of rock out of the chamber once the benches, the buttress and the curve of the ceiling are allowed for, 9 m³ out of the pit, and about 1 m³ more for the doorway, the niche and Tomb 9. That is about 27 m³ of solid rock, or 35 m³ of loose spoil to carry up and away. At 0.5 to 1 m³ per person per day it comes to 27–53 person-days. A room 1.78 m high has space for only two or three people cutting at once, so on our estimate a small team would have needed 2 to 5 weeks.

Moyer’s study of the bones found seven people in the chamber (Moyer 1989; Goring 1989, pp. 100–101; Keswani 2004, p. 114). The excavators numbered them Sk 1 to Sk 7.

Sk 1 was a woman of nineteen or twenty, lying alone and complete on the west bench. Sk 2 was a woman of twenty-one to twenty-four, represented by her skull, a few vertebrae and scattered bones of the legs, shoulder, hands and feet at the north end of the east bench and on the floor beside it. Sk 3 was a young woman of about seventeen, also on the east bench, her skeleton fairly complete but broken into many pieces. Sk 4 was a child of about three, whose disarticulated bones lay on the floor near the north end of the east bench, with three unworn milk teeth on the bench itself. Sk 5, 6 and 7 were three infants at or near full term, estimated at about 37 to 39 weeks’ gestation; their bones lay together in a small heap on the floor beside the west bench.

There were no adult men. Goring summed it up as “three women and four children” (Goring 1989, p. 104), which corrects the “three children” of the first report, written during the season (Russell & McClellan 1985). Anna Osterholtz, re-examining the remains, gives a minimum of eight people for the tomb with the niche in the entrance pit included (Osterholtz 2015, pp. 222–223). Two more people were found in that niche and a newborn in Tomb 9, so the model shows 10 in all, with the three outside the chamber marked as context.

Bolger called the tomb “the most prestigious female mortuary facility known from prehistoric Cyprus” (Bolger 2003, p. 172, via Knapp 2008). Whether the three infants were children of the women beside them cannot be known; as Knapp puts it, one can only speculate (Knapp 2008, p. 213). In the model and the drawings the dead are shown as skeletons, placed and posed as the excavators describe them.

The bones themselves record that the tomb was used more than once. Sk 3’s small bones were scattered over the east bench, but her long bones had been gathered up and laid along the bench in pairs, an arm bone with a leg bone, in arrangements no articulated body could take, with her skull at the south end (Goring 1989, p. 100; Goring 1996). Someone had moved her after the flesh had gone. Sk 2’s skull and the vertebrae beside it lay undisturbed at the north end of the same bench, and Goring thought she was probably brought into the tomb as bones, from a first burial somewhere else. Three unworn milk teeth on the east bench suggest that the child Sk 4 lay there too before ending on the floor, unless they came from another child.

The two benches were not equal. The west bench held one body, whole and dressed; the east bench held what was left of earlier ones. Goring read the west bench as a laying-out place: each new body was laid there, and whoever already occupied it was moved across to the east bench to make room (Goring 1989, p. 101). On that reading Sk 2 too may have begun as a burial on the west bench. Keswani is more specific. In her reading Sk 3 was the first person buried in the tomb, laid on the west bench and later moved, partly decomposed, to the east bench when Sk 1 arrived (Keswani 2004, pp. 114, 173). Both readings agree that the west bench was the first place and the east bench the second.

The model shows the excavators’ reading by default and Keswani’s as a switch. Its “Through time” mode runs through 16 events, from the cutting of the chamber to the excavation. In the default order Sk 2 is laid out first on the west bench and lifted to the north end of the east bench when Sk 3 arrives; the child Sk 4 follows, and a clearance before Sk 1’s funeral moves Sk 3 across to the east bench as well. Switched to Keswani’s reading, Sk 3 comes first and Sk 2 arrives already as bones, set straight on the east bench. The jewellery of Sk 2 and Sk 3 could not be told apart on the bench (Goring 1996), so to let the clearance carry it across we attach the east-bench jewellery to Sk 3, except one earring and the four gold mountings, which stay by Sk 2’s skull. That attachment is our choice. When Sk 3 was moved, the goods already on the floor were left where they stood (Goring 1989, p. 102).

Every funeral meant reopening the tomb: digging out the fill of the entrance pit, moving the slab, and filling the pit again afterwards. On our estimate each reopening moved some 12 m³ of loose fill out and back, and with at least 5 later visits that comes to about 60 m³, more than the 35 m³ of spoil that cutting the tomb had produced.

Sk 1 lay on her back on the west bench with her head towards the doorway. Her upper body was raised at what Goring called “a strangely high angle”, and her arms lay away from her sides, so she was not tightly wrapped in a shroud. The posture suggested to Goring a body pulled along the bench into place and then left as it lay (Goring 1989, pp. 100–101). The model and the drawings cannot raise a skeleton’s upper body, so they show her lying flat on the bench with her arms at her sides. The skeleton tells a little about her life: one carious tooth, very little tartar, and degenerative damage to a finger bone of the right hand, perhaps from an injury (Moyer 1989, pp. 64–65, via Smith 2018).

She was buried wearing everything, and nothing had been disturbed, so the excavators could record where each piece sat on the body (Goring 1996). Six plain gold hoop earrings lay three on each side of her head: she wore three in each ear. Four large spirals of solid gold lay two on each side, for the hair or the ears. Around her neck were at least one and probably two strings of beads: nine granulated gold spacer beads, twenty gold tubes, a spacer of Egyptian blue at the back of the neck, glass ring beads, beads of faience and one apparently of amber. Any beads of organic material would have rotted away. On each foot she wore a silver toe ring with open, overlapping ends, found among the bones of the toes. Goring called her “the best-equipped single burial so far known from Late Bronze Age Cyprus” (Goring 1996).

Two gold signet rings are counted with her jewellery. They are near twins: each has a fixed rectangular bezel divided into two registers, with the same four signs of the Cypro-Minoan script in one, and in the other an animal head like a bull’s beside a second motif, a roundel ringed with dots on one ring and a striated form with four hanging strokes on the other. Both were worn before they reached the tomb (Goring 1996, p. 32), and Smith suggests the bezels may have been recut and the rings passed through more than one owner (Smith 2018). Neither was found on the body. One, K-AD 734, was recovered in the sieve. The other, K-AD 795, lay on the floor below the bench with the bones of her right forearm and hand, which had fallen there as the body decayed (Goring 1996, p. 31), so she was probably wearing it on that hand.

The pieces are small. An earring is about 2 cm across; the model draws everything at true size, and its “Highlight small finds” switch rings each small piece so that it can be found from a distance. The close-up tour stop frames the west bench at about 60 cm.

The east bench held most of the rest of the gold, spread over and below it with the bones of Sk 2 and Sk 3, and none of it can be assigned to one woman or the other (Goring 1996). There were six more plain hoop earrings, one among the fragments of Sk 2’s skull and five over and just below the bench, and seven spirals, three of which, to judge by their wear, had been used as finger rings. Two penannular gold bracelets, of 42.6 and 43.05 g, have zigzag and lattice decoration at their ends; their gold is alluvial, with tiny inclusions of platinum-group metals. A third bracelet, K-AD 706, has rectangular cut-out panels and was set with three ivory roundels in rings of gold granules, one now missing; it is unique in Cyprus (Goring 1996).

One piece came from the Aegean: a necklace of twenty-one gold relief beads in the form of stylised ivy leaves, made to interlock (K-AD 735). It was the first complete necklace of its kind found on Cyprus and the only imported Aegean jewel in the tomb. A second signet, smaller than Sk 1’s pair, is Egyptian and shows the crocodile god Sobek. There were 35 tiny ring beads, probably of gold, and 39 tiny gold pendants shaped like pomegranates, each built from three parts and about a third the size of the smallest known parallels, perhaps once sewn as a fringe to a headscarf. There were two more silver toe rings, and four gold “funnel-shaped” mountings in two pairs, found close together by a skull, whose purpose nobody knows (Goring 1996). The other beads on this bench, of gold, glass, faience and bone, were never counted in print; the model scatters 40 of them by rule and marks them so.

The gold from the tomb weighs 432 g in all, more than any other Late Bronze Age tomb on Cyprus except Enkomi British Tomb 93 (Russell & McClellan 1985; Keswani 2004, p. 131). Goring weighed the pieces and noticed a pattern. The six earrings from the west bench weigh 10.15 to 10.9 g each, close to a unit of about 10.8 g, and the four west-bench spirals 15.35 to 15.95 g each, 62.7 g together. The six earrings from the east bench are lighter, 7.0 to 7.85 g each, and as a set they come to about four of the same units. Goring suggested that gold was made and kept to known weights, as stored wealth that could be counted, a dowry or a kind of currency. It remains a suggestion, and it is often repeated in a wrong form, with all twelve earrings at 10.8 g each; only the six from the west bench come close to that weight.

Some things are missing. There were no gold diadems and no mouthpieces, the thin gold bands laid over the face or mouth in some rich Late Cypriot burials; no dress pins; no decorated earrings; and of weapons only one bronze dagger (Goring 1996).

The first report counted 30 complete pots, seven of them Mycenaean (Russell & McClellan 1985). With the restorable vessels the total is about forty: at least 17 or 18 Red Lustrous spindle bottles, 5 Red Lustrous lentoid flasks, 7 Mycenaean vessels, 7 of Base Ring ware and 4 of White Slip (Knappett et al. 2005, citing South 1997, p. 161). The model draws 41, with 18 spindle bottles.

Many of the vessels come in matched sets, and Goring listed them: two Mycenaean kraters, each with a cup inside it; two Base Ring rhyta in the shape of bulls, almost identical; two core-formed glass vessels; two ivory boxes shaped like ducks; three identical Mycenaean piriform jars; three pedestalled Base Ring bowls; and three White Slip “milk bowls”, hemispherical with a wishbone handle (Goring 1989, p. 102). A krater is a wide mixing bowl for wine. One of the pair, K-AD 690, is painted with fish, 31 cm high and 33 cm across, and holds 18.5 litres; a Base Ring cup was found sitting inside it (Pilides & Papadimitriou 2012, cat. 219). The other is painted with lilies. The three piriform jars, K-AD 779, 793 and 814, are of Furumark’s shape 45, small closed jars for oil or scent (South & Russell 1993, pp. 306, 308). That the seven Base Ring pieces are exactly the two cups, the two rhyta and the three pedestalled bowls is our reading of the counts.

Paired kraters with drinking cups, pouring vessels and footed dishes make a service for wine and food, and the bones of sheep, goat, rock dove and fish and the eggshells found with them suggest the meal (Goring 1989, p. 102; Goring 1996). Whether the living ate it in the tomb or set it out for the dead, the evidence does not say. The commonest vessels in the tomb, though, are the Red Lustrous ones: tall, slim spindle bottles and flat lentoid flasks thrown on the wheel, together more than all the other wares combined.

The rest of the floor held small precious things. The better-preserved ivory duck, K-AD 831, is cut from hippopotamus ivory, 12.8 cm long, with its head turned back over its body; its swivel lid is missing, and a peg hole underneath took a stand (Pilides & Papadimitriou 2012, cat. 227). A second, larger duck survives in fragments, and other ivory boxes were found with them. The core-formed glass amphoriskos K-AD 811, 11.7 cm high, dark blue with white and yellow festoons, is Egyptian work of the 18th Dynasty, dated to the reigns of Amenhotep III to Akhenaten (Pilides & Papadimitriou 2012, cat. 106). Besides these there were a second glass vessel; a composite pyxis, a cylindrical box with a disc-shaped lid, of glass, gold, copper alloy, lead and perhaps silver; a bronze dagger; and a double-sided stamp seal of stone (Russell & McClellan 1985; Knapp 2008, p. 213).

The published accounts give positions for only a few of these things: the cups inside the kraters, and the milk bowls with the infants. For the rest we follow a stated rule. The feasting set stands on the open floor between the benches; the spindle bottles stand in rows against the back walls of both lobes (7 on the west, 8 on the east) and 3 against the front wall, with the five flasks on the other side of the door; the piriform jars stand together near the foot of the east bench; the ivory, glass and seal lie at the head of the west bench; the dagger at its foot. The sources cannot separate goods left at the earlier funerals from those left at Sk 1’s, so the model puts all the floor goods down with her, except the three milk bowls.

After Sk 1’s funeral, water got in. The slab in the doorway never closed it fully, and a thin layer of silt, no more than 5 cm, washed over the floor and the goods standing on it (Keswani 2004, p. 114; Knapp 2008, p. 213). Otherwise the tomb was not seriously disturbed by flooding or by falls of rock (Goring 1996). At some point as Sk 1’s body decayed, her right forearm and hand dropped from the bench to the floor, taking the signet ring K-AD 795 with them; whether before or after the silt came in cannot be told.

The last thing put into the tomb lay on top of that silt. Beside the west bench, between the bench and the fallen ring, the bones of the three infants Sk 5, 6 and 7 were found mixed together with the bones of fish and birds, densely packed within a roughly circular area, 5 cm above the floor (Goring 1989, pp. 101–102). They were secondary burials: the infants’ bones were already apart when they were placed, so they had been kept or buried somewhere else first. The tight circle suggests a basket or a bag that has since rotted. With them were the three White Slip milk bowls, the set of three on the floor that belongs to this deposit and not to Sk 1’s funeral.

The slab was set in the doorway for the last time, covering only part of it, and the pit was filled. The last deposit falls in LC IIA:2 or perhaps LC IIB.

The entrance pit was used again. The niche in its east wall held the fragmentary, secondary remains of two people: a child of about two and a young adult of seventeen to twenty-five (Keswani 2004, p. 114). Knapp, citing South, gives a large bronze ring and a single Base Ring I juglet with the adult (Knapp 2008, p. 213, citing South 2000, p. 352); whether those two objects belong to the niche or to Tomb 9 is not certain, and the model offers both. Osterholtz’s study of the teeth from the niche found at least two young children, one aged three to nine months and one between about fifteen months and two and three-quarter years, with fragments of long bones (Osterholtz 2015, p. 223). The burials in the niche are undated within the Late Cypriot period.

The small Tomb 9 at the other end of the pit had, in Goring’s words, “been thoroughly looted” (Goring 1996). Keswani and Knapp record fragments of Late Cypriot II fine pottery, bits of ivory and a nearly complete newborn infant in it (Keswani 2004, p. 114; Knapp 2008, p. 212), while Osterholtz reports that it held no human remains (Osterholtz 2015, p. 222). The model shows Tomb 9 robbed, with its fragments and the newborn as the two more detailed accounts give them.

In the 13th century BC Building X went up beside the old pit, and the street along its west wall was laid over it. Around 1200 BC Ayios Dhimitrios was abandoned. In the Roman period people came back to the ruins for building stone and carried off ashlar blocks from the buildings next to the tomb; Tomb 11 was not touched (Osterholtz 2015, p. 222, from information supplied by the excavators). Soil built up over the street until 1984, when the excavators found what this report began with: the slab partly across the doorway, a skin of silt on the floor, and a young woman in gold on the west bench.

The excavators registered 177 items from the tomb (Knapp 2008, p. 213, citing South 2000). The model draws 271 pieces in 87 entries, 267 of them in the chamber, and the difference is mostly beads: the register appears to have given a string or group of beads one number, where the model draws each bead, and the 177 probably also covers samples and bones. Some of our pieces are rule counts, numbers we have had to choose because the published text gives a class without a number: the 40 other beads on the east bench, 3 eggs and 2 ivory pyxides. The shapes of three vessels (two Mycenaean, one White Slip) and of the second glass vessel are unpublished, and the model draws plain types for them.

Of the pieces drawn, 175 are placed where the published text puts them, on a body, a bench or a named spot on the floor, and 96 are placed by the rules set out above. None is placed from the excavators’ plan of the tomb (Goring 1989, fig. 13.1), which marks every find but could not be consulted for this reconstruction. The “Where positions come from” view colours each object by the source of its position, and the card for each object says the same in words.

Of the architecture, only the chamber’s three dimensions are published as measurements: 4.39 by 2.81 m and 1.78 m high. The doorway is “less than a meter high” and Tomb 9 “less than 1 m sq”; nothing else is given in figures. The benches, the doorway, the steps, the slab, the pit, the niche, Tomb 9, the ceiling’s shape and the depth of rock over the tomb are our estimates, made to fit the published description. So is the orientation: we set the chamber due north of its pit, on the evidence of Tomb 9 at the pit’s south end and the north-south line of tombs under the street, but Building X’s grid is close to north, not certainly on it.

Where the scholars disagree, or the published text allows two readings, the model shows the excavator’s reading and lets the reader switch to the other: Keswani’s order of the first burials against Goring’s laying-out bench, the four gold mountings by Sk 3’s skull at the south end of the bench instead of Sk 2’s at the north, and the niche’s juglet and ring in Tomb 9. The three steps may have led down into the pit rather than through the doorway; that question has no switch, and the model keeps them in the doorway. The plan printed with Goring’s 1989 paper marks where each object lay. Set beside the “Where positions come from” view, it would show at once which of our 96 ruled positions it confirms and which it moves.