A Sealed Chamber Tomb at Sotira-Kaminoudhia, c. 2250 BC

Kaminoudhia is an Early Bronze Age village near Sotira, in the Limassol district, dug by Stuart Swiny for the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute in the 1980s and published in full in 2003 (Swiny, Rapp and Herscher 2003). One of its houses is rebuilt in a companion reconstruction. Its dead were buried about 100 m north-north-east of the houses, on the west flank of a narrow valley at 290 to 300 m above sea level. That is Cemetery A. A second group, Cemetery B, lies on the facing slope, and the two were probably one spread of tombs across the valley floor, now hidden under later field terraces (Swiny and Herscher 2003, pp. 103–104).

The rock is the soft chalk and limestone of the Pakhna Formation (Monahan 2010, p. 98), under a thin topsoil of red terra rossa mixed with eroded limestone (p. 104). It is easy to cut with a pick and weak as a roof, which made the tomb quick to dig and probably explains why its roof later fell.

Fifteen tombs were excavated in Cemetery A in 1981 and 1983, besides one dug by Porphyrios Dikaios in 1947, which held six vessels including a cooking pot and whose exact place has since been lost (pp. 105–107). They run from the Philia phase, the start of the Bronze Age on the island, to Early Cypriot III. Three kinds of grave were found: chambers reached by a short entrance passage, the dromos; chambers with no passage at all, entered through a hole in the roof (Tombs 7, 12, 15 and 17); and simple cist graves (pp. 104, 129, 133). The chambers are small, mostly 0.8 to 1.3 m across. The largest, Tomb 12, measures 2.0 by 1.6 m and held nine objects and a few bones of a child about three years old. Tomb 20 was found sealed and empty. Leaving aside Tomb 15 and the empty Tomb 20, a Kaminoudhia tomb held between one and nine objects, most often three to six, counted from the published plans.

Tomb 14 is the one tomb in the cemetery with a well-preserved dromos, and it was found sealed and undisturbed (p. 127). Its plan and section were published together, with the four pots numbered on them (fig. 3.4, p. 125). That makes it the best tomb on the site to cut open in a model: a single Early Bronze Age burial on the south coast, left as it was closed.

The chamber is a rough oval, 1.28 m north to south and 0.94 m east to west at floor level, a floor of about 0.94 m², smaller than a single bed (p. 127). Its walls survive to 1.20 m, and the floor lies 1.35 m below the top of the slab in the doorway. The walls lean outward as they go down, so the room is widest near the floor, the profile of a bell; Swiny notes the same outward curve below the doorway, towards the ledge the slab stood on (p. 133). The roof had fallen before excavation. The model restores it as a low dome rising to about 1.35 m above the floor, the generic Kaminoudhia form, “domed, roughly circular” (p. 104), but its height and curve are our reconstruction.

Cutting it meant removing about 0.9 m³ of chalk from the chamber, all of it through a doorway half a metre wide. The dromos and the step in front of it, dug down from the ancient surface of the slope, added more than as much again, most of it the weathered chalk and soil of the upper metre. The whole tomb comes to about 2.2 m³ dug, 1.2 m³ of it in sound rock, or 3.4 m³ of loose spoil once broken up, some 170 baskets (our estimate). With one person cutting and a second carrying the spoil out, at 0.3 to 0.6 m³ a person-day in sound chalk this soft and twice that in the weathered chalk above it, the work comes to 3 to 6 person-days, again our estimate.

No tool marks were recorded in Tomb 14. The only ones in the cemetery are in Tomb 17, “the original tool marks of an adze-like instrument” on its curving walls (p. 133), and the model shows faint facets of that kind as an analogy. Picks of stone or antler could have done most of the work. Copper-based tools were in use at Kaminoudhia, which produced 25 metal objects in all, so an adze or chisel for the finishing is possible too.

The Vounous tomb rebuilt in the companion page needed about 14.5 m³ of rock removed and 24 to 36 person-days, by the same kind of estimate.

The tomb was approached from the downhill side. A shallow step, 0.55 m wide and 0.25 m deep, led into a dromos semicircular in plan, 0.90 m long and 1.0 m wide, cut 0.20 m into sound rock (p. 127). Above that depth the sides of the passage lay in weathered bedrock that had begun to harden again, and the excavators could hardly see where the cut ended. At the inner end the doorway, the stomion, opened through the rock onto a ledge, and from the ledge there was a drop of about 0.6 m to the chamber floor. “Always a step down” is how the publication describes the way into a Kaminoudhia chamber (p. 104).

The doorway was closed with a plaka, a single unworked slab of limestone set upright on the ledge. The section drawing makes it about 0.7 m tall and 0.13 m thick; its width was not published, and the model gives it 0.60 m, which makes it about 130 kg, a load for two people (our estimate). The dromos in front was then packed with more limestone slabs laid against the plaka in a matrix of crushed chalk, and the hollow filled in. In 1983 the plaka still stood where it had been set (p. 127, pl. 3.4b).

Which wall the doorway is in has to be read from the drawing. The text says the dromos slabs “on the south side abutted against the in situ plaka” (p. 127), which could suggest a doorway facing south. The section, though, runs from west to east with the chamber on the west, the plaka in the middle and the dromos and the falling hillside on the east, and the amphora that the plan places in the west half of the chamber sits on the west side of the section too. In discussing Tomb 15 Swiny also says that Tomb 14 “was provided with a dromos on the usual down-slope side” (p. 129), and the slope falls to the east. The model therefore puts the doorway in the east wall, so the man inside, facing his doorway, faced east. The phrase about the south side is taken to describe the slabs.

One person was buried in Tomb 14. Carole Schulte Campbell, who studied the human remains, identified an adult, probably a man, in his mid to late twenties (Schulte Campbell 2003, pp. 422–424). The skeleton was well represented but the bone itself poorly preserved. His teeth were large and only lightly worn, his skull showed none of the deliberate shaping in infancy known from some prehistoric Cypriot skulls, and his right thigh bone was bowed. The question mark over his sex is hers and stays in the model.

He lay on the chamber floor, flexed, on his right side, with his head to the south and his face to the east, towards the doorway (p. 127). His skull lies in the southern part of the chamber and his bent legs reach towards the stomion. This was the rule in the cemetery: in Tombs 14 and 17 the dead lie “flexed… on its right side, head to the south, looking east”, and Swiny assumes the same for Tomb 15 (pp. 129, 133). In a chamber with its door in the east wall, a body laid that way faced the way in.

Nothing about his clothing, a mat or a shroud was recorded, and the model adds none. The body is shown as a skeleton, in the posture the plan records.

The whole inventory of Tomb 14 is five objects, four Red Polished pots and one flake of chert (pp. 127–128). Red Polished is the island’s standard pottery of the period, handmade, coated in a red slip and burnished; these four are undecorated, with a thick dark red-brown slip that is now worn.

The jug is the largest thing in the tomb, 41.2 cm tall, an ovoid body on a flat base with a handle attached crookedly from mid-neck to shoulder and, beside the lower end of the handle, a small round knob that may be a potter’s mark (Swiny, Rapp and Herscher 2003, p. 168). It stood at the man’s feet, nearest the door. The two amphorae, small two-handled jars about 21 and 22 cm tall, stood behind his back, towards the west wall. The bowl, 10 cm high with a small conical knob on its rim, lay in front of his lower body, within reach of his hands. The chert flake, “perhaps part of a sickle”, was found with the burial but its place was not drawn (p. 128); the model puts it by his hands, which is our placement.

What the pots held was not recorded. A jug, two closed jars and a bowl are vessels for pouring, keeping and eating from. In Tomb 15 next door, and in Dikaios’s tomb of 1947, cooking pots went into the grave, and Priscilla Keswani reads such pots as the equipment of a meal shared at the funeral (Keswani 2004, p. 82). Tomb 14 had no cooking pot. The flake, if it was a sickle blade, is a harvesting tool.

Tomb 14 held “no metal, beads or pendants” (p. 128). It also lacked the incised Red Polished South Coast ware typical of its phase in this cemetery, the flasks and conical bowls found in Tombs 4, 7, 9 and 18 (Herscher and Swiny 2003, p. 496). The jug and amphorae date it to Early Cypriot I/II, about 2300 to 2200 BC: their closest parallels are a tomb group from Psematismenos-Trelloukkas, further east along the south coast, and the early Red Polished pottery of Vounous on the north coast (p. 128; Herscher and Swiny 2003, p. 496). Radiocarbon dates from the settlement span about 2400 to 2174 BC for the site as a whole.

Once the plaka was in place and the dromos packed, Tomb 14 was never opened again. “The contents of this chamber did not seem to have been disturbed by human agency”, Swiny writes (p. 127). There was no second burial, no clearing aside of the first, no robbing in antiquity or since. Southern Early Bronze Age tombs are often assumed to look poor because they were looted; Tomb 14 was intact, so its five objects are all that were put in it.

The roof, though, fell in, and the chamber filled with “a hard-packed deposit of almost sterile eroded bedrock” (p. 127). The model puts about 0.76 m of chalk and soil over the crown of the dome when it was cut, and 0.36 m today, only 0.18 m of it rock (our reconstruction of the ancient ground surface, which has eroded away). That thin shell of soft chalk over an open room is the probable reason the roof gave way (our reading). When the tomb was dug the jug and both amphorae lay on their sides, mouths to the west. Swiny considered both explanations: the vessels “faced west, either because they had been deposited in that manner or, which seems more likely, they had fallen over in this direction from an original standing position” (p. 127). The model follows his preferred reading, with the pots standing at the funeral and toppled as found, and a switch shows the other, with the pots laid on their sides by the mourners.

Over the following four thousand years the slope wore down, until only 0.15 to 0.20 m of soil covered the top of the plaka, and the valley was terraced for fields, burying other tombs deeper (pp. 103–104). The timeline in the model runs through these events for both tombs: the cutting of Tomb 15 and its three burials, then the cutting, burial and sealing of Tomb 14, the two roof falls, the erosion of the hillside and the excavations of 1981 to 1983, thirteen events in all.

About 0.4 m south of Tomb 14, through the rock, lies Tomb 15 (p. 129). It is older, of the Philia phase, about 2400 BC, and it was used differently. Schulte Campbell calls it “the only example of tomb reuse in this collection” (Schulte Campbell 2003, p. 424); Herscher reads the mixed finds of Tomb 4 as a second case, but Tomb 15 is the only one that can be shown (Herscher and Swiny 2003, p. 497).

Its chamber is an oval 1.24 by 1.06 m, its floor 0.9 m below the present ground, its walls preserved to 0.68 m (p. 129). Erosion had taken at least a third of it, and no dromos survives. The chamber was probably entered through the roof, as Tombs 7, 12 and 17 were; the model gives it an opening about 0.5 m across at the crown, closed with cobbles, after the roof hole of Tomb 7, and both are our reconstruction. A hole 0.25 m wide in its west wall at floor level opens into Tomb 17, but the excavators thought it was made by erosion, not by the builders.

Three people were buried in it, and by the time of excavation none of them was articulated. A skull, numbered 3 by the excavators, lay at the west edge of the chamber with its jaw and most of the long bones. Skulls 1 and 2, with a few long bones, lay in the south-east quarter, where the heads should be under the cemetery’s rule; the north-east quarter was empty. Swiny’s reading is that skull 3 belonged to the first burial, whose remains were swept to the west side when the tomb was reopened for the two later burials (p. 129). The teeth show one young individual, whose third molars had not yet erupted, and one older one with heavy wear; the excavation notes tie the younger to skull 1, which can no longer be checked (Schulte Campbell 2003, p. 425).

Schulte Campbell’s own wording can be read the other way: “what is believed to be the first burial is in the best condition”, she writes, before describing skull 1 in the south-east as the best preserved (p. 424). The model shows the excavator’s order by default and the reversed order as a switch.

Tomb 15 held 149 pieces in twelve catalogue entries, against Tomb 14’s five (pp. 129–132). Four were pots: a large Red Polished jug, a two-handled cooking pot 23.7 cm tall, an ear-lug jar, named for its ear-shaped lug handles, incised with hatched lozenges and herringbone, and a small incised bottle, the last two in the Red Polished Philia ware of the earliest Bronze Age. There was a biconical terracotta bead or spindle whorl, 2.7 cm across, and a fragment of a saddle quern, the flat stone on which grain was ground.

Four objects were copper-based: a dagger 16.2 cm long with a flat tang and a flat midrib, intact; an awl 9.5 cm long; and two small spiral earrings, one of them now in ten fragments (pp. 131–132). Tin was detected in two Philia spiral earrings from other tombs on the site; the metal of Tomb 15 has not been shown to contain tin, so it is called copper-based here, not bronze (Swiny 2003, p. 369).

Near skull 2 lay a necklace. Its seven pendants are tiny human figures, 1.8 to 2.8 cm long, six of picrolite, the soft blue-green stone of the Troodos rivers, and one of shell with stubs for arms (p. 132). With them were 132 miniature beads of jasper, white limestone and siltstone, in black, white and brown, some still in a line between two of the pendants 7.5 cm apart (p. 131). The narrative text counts “one shell and seven picrolite” pendants, eight in all (p. 129); the catalogue’s seven is followed here.

Those four copper objects are a third of all the metal from Cemetery A, which yielded only 12 metal objects in all (Swiny 2003, p. 369). The dagger lay beside skull 3 at the west edge, with the cooking pot, the large jug and the quern fragment. The publication does not say which goods went with which burial, so the model’s assignment, made by where each object lay, is our reading: dagger, jug, cooking pot, quern and whorl with the first burial; the necklace, earrings, awl, the lug-handled jar and the bottle with the later two. On that reading the dagger stayed with the remains it belonged to when they were pushed aside.

Vounous Tomb 36, on the north coast, was dug by Dikaios in 1932 and is rebuilt on its own page. It is a little later than Tomb 14, Early Cypriot II/III, and its pottery belongs to the same Red Polished tradition, so the two tombs share a period and a ware and differ in almost every count.

The Vounous figures come from Dikaios’s report (Dikaios 1940, pp. 72–76) and the Vounous page’s estimates. The Vounous chamber has nine times the floor of Tomb 14, and Tomb 14 would stand inside it with room to walk round; the same-scale drawing below sets the two side by side. It held 27 times as many objects and nine times as many people.

Tomb 36 is a large tomb even at Vounous, but the averages point the same way. Across Vounous Site A, 84 tombs yielded 834 vessels, about ten a tomb, and metal turned up in 49 per cent of them (Keswani 2004). The whole of Kaminoudhia Cemetery A produced 12 metal objects. Reopening was routine at Vounous, with the bones of earlier burials swept into heaps to make room; at Kaminoudhia it is demonstrated once, in Tomb 15. Tomb 14 was found intact, so the gap in the counts is real and was there on the day of the funeral. Keswani’s reading is that the south used the same mortuary customs as the north, with the dead laid in rock-cut chambers with pottery for pouring and eating, on a smaller and quieter scale (Keswani 2004, pp. 88–89).

The model shows 154 objects and four people, every object published from the two tombs and nothing added. A view called “Where positions come from” colours each one by its source. In Tomb 14 the four pots and the body are placed from the excavators’ plan, read to within about 5 cm; the chert flake, which the plan omits, is our placement, by his hands. Not every find spot in Tomb 15 was drawn (p. 129). The dagger, the two earrings, six pendants and the 132 beads are placed from its plan; the four pots, the whorl, the quern fragment, the awl and the shell pendant from the text. The postures of the Tomb 15 dead at their burials follow the cemetery’s rule, since only skulls and a few long bones were found.

Where the text and the drawing disagree, the text wins. The scale bar on fig. 3.4 gives dimensions 7 to 15 per cent off the written ones; the drawn plan probably traces the widest part of the bell-shaped wall, not the floor. The width of the doorway and of the plaka, the height and curve of the lost roof, the position of the doorway along the east wall and the level of the ancient ground surface are reconstructions. So are the volumes of rock and the days of work, which are our estimates. The direction of the doorway is read from the section drawing, as described above.

Two disagreements are shown as switches, with the excavator’s reading as the default: whether the pots of Tomb 14 fell or were laid on their sides, and the order of the burials in Tomb 15. Who the man in Tomb 14 was to the three people of Tomb 15, buried in the Philia phase, perhaps a century before him, on the other side of 0.4 m of chalk, is not known.