Souskiou-Laona Tomb 158: A Chalcolithic Shaft Grave

For most of the Chalcolithic, the age in which Cypriots first worked copper, the dead were buried among the living. At Lemba, Kissonerga and Erimi the graves are pits cut in and between the round houses (see Neolithic and Chalcolithic burial). Souskiou is the exception. Its two cemeteries, on the outcrops of Laona and Vathyrkakas, are the only Chalcolithic burial grounds in Cyprus known to lie apart from the settlement that used them (FM 2019, Chap. 21).

The Laona cemetery occupies a low outcrop of hard rock with about 600 m² of usable surface. On it the excavators recorded 142 features: shaft tombs, pit graves, scoop pits that held shell beads but no bones, and stretches of bare rock left without tombs. The tombs fall into clusters. Tomb 158 belongs to the one around Tomb 162, whose mouth has the largest cut seating for a capstone on the outcrop, 2.05 by 1.86 m and 0.28 m deep, beside what may be a levelled open area at the centre of the rock. Its neighbours in the cluster are Tombs 160, 161, 164, 165, 192 and 193, and Tomb 159 lies next to it (Chap. 8). The intact deposits on the outcrop held at least 117 people, and 203 once the disturbed tombs are added; the excavators put the true number nearer 400 (Chap. 9).

A tomb on the outcrop had to be walked to, opened and closed again, and at Laona closing it meant moving a slab of stone that, on our estimate, weighed about half a tonne. Tomb 158 records what went on during those visits as fully as any tomb at Souskiou: a first burial, the stacking of the bones, further burials and a last one, with jewellery that moved along with the bones.

The other cemetery at Souskiou is the better known. Vathyrkakas Cemetery 1 holds about a hundred tombs, deeper than those at Laona and shaped like bottles, published by Edgar Peltenburg in 2006 from the work of four missions between 1950 and 1997. Its best-known tomb, Tomb 73, is a large shaft for two adult men, closed by a capstone pierced for handling and ringed by a kerb of stones that has been read as the base of a mound.

The difference is in the record. The Laona volume itself calls the Vathyrkakas data “of variable quality” (Chap. 21), and the bones there were not recorded skeleton by skeleton. At Laona they were. For Tomb 158 the excavators published a catalogue entry with dimensions, fills and every registered object; a plan and profile of the shaft; two plans of the burial layer at 1:10, one of the upper level of bones and one of the lower, with the finds marked; photographs and drawings of the objects; and an account of the burials by the osteologist Kirsi Lorentz (Chap. 8, Pls 49–50; Chap. 9). Its burial layer was intact. It is also the richest tomb at Laona, with the only copper from the cemetery, some of the earliest faience found in Cyprus, two cruciform pendants still among their beads, and a painted tripod flask unlike any other from Souskiou (Chap. 8; Chap. 21).

Tombs of this kind are sometimes described as shaft-and-chamber or bell-shaped tombs, as if a room opened off the bottom of the shaft. Tomb 158 has no chamber. The shaft widens a little as it goes down, and the widened base is all the room there is.

The tomb is a single shaft cut down from the surface of the rock. Its mouth is an irregular, roughly rectangular opening 1.10 x 0.73 m, with its long axis running east–west. Below the mouth the walls swell outwards and curve in again, “belling slightly” in the excavators’ words, to an oval floor 1.45 x 0.89 m across, dished and uneven. From the rock surface to the lowest point of the floor it measures 1.82 m (Chap. 8). There is no entrance passage, no doorway and no side room. Everyone who went into the tomb, mourner or dead, went in from above.

The published profile gives the shape in one direction only, along the long axis. On it the west wall stands nearly vertical for its top 30 cm and then bulges outwards by 10 to 15 cm at mid-depth; the east wall has a slight overhang just under the lip, so the mouth is narrower than the shaft below it. The widest point, about 1.5 m, falls about half a metre above the floor (Pl. 49.1, read from the plate by us). On the section line the floor lies 1.73 m below the rock, less than the catalogue’s 1.82 m. Our reading is that the rock surface rises a little towards the east, so that the catalogue measured from the higher, eastern lip, and the model slopes the rock to match. No north–south profile was published, and our cross-section is reconstructed from the plans of the mouth and the floor. The drawing is marked accordingly.

Set beside its neighbours, the tomb is ordinary in depth and floor and unusual at the mouth. Laona shafts average 1.87 m deep, with floors averaging 1.40 by 0.89 m, almost exactly Tomb 158’s. Their mouths average 1.03 by 0.52 m, so Tomb 158’s, 0.73 m wide, is unusually broad; the widest of all the Laona shaft mouths is 0.95 m (Chap. 8, Table 8.1). Laona mouths were kept about twice as long as wide, “to facilitate sealing with capstones” (Chap. 8), and a wider mouth needed a bigger stone.

The rock at Laona comes in two layers. On top lies kafkalla, a hard crust of calcrete that forms at the surface in Cyprus’s dry climate; under it lies havara, a soft, chalky marl. The tomb builders started from kafkalla or mixed rock in 94 per cent of cases, and they chose places where the crust was split by fissures, which gave them a way through it (Chap. 8). Tomb 158’s mouth has a fissure along its north edge and another along its south. From 0.70–0.90 m below the mouth the walls are eroded havara.

The tools have not been found, and they were not metal: the two copper ornaments in this tomb are the only copper from the cemetery. Tomb 158 shows no tool marks at all, though faint vertical marks survive on the walls of Tomb 156 nearby. The best clue lies on two other tombs, 168 and 172, where ground-stone cutting tools had been left on the stones that sealed them, the only such finds at Laona (Chap. 8). Heavy stone picks or adzes probably broke the crust. The havara below could have been loosened with digging sticks of wood or antler, a suggestion drawn from analogy, since none survive.

Our estimate of the work is this. The shaft held about 1.7 m³ of rock (1.5 to 1.9 m³, depending on how the unpublished north–south profile is drawn), some 3 to 3.5 tonnes once broken, all of it lifted out, in our reconstruction in baskets, through a mouth less than a metre wide. That is 5 to 10 person-days of work: 2 to 5 days for two people, one cutting and one hauling, most of it spent on the crust. No experiment has tested this, and the figure is speculative. Build mode shows the five steps, with our estimate of the spoil and labour for each.

A capstone laid across the mouth closed the tomb. None survives whole. In the upper fill of the shaft the excavators found large flat pieces of capstone, the biggest 0.70 by 0.60 m, mixed with boulders that may belong to this tomb or a neighbour (Chap. 8, Pl. 50.1). A slab that spanned a mouth of 1.10 x 0.73 m and rested on the rock around it needed to be larger than the mouth, and we reconstruct it as one stone about 1.25 x 0.90 m. We have drawn it 0.20 m thick, which is a guess; at that size it weighs about half a tonne. Three Laona tombs, all in the cluster round Tomb 162, had a rebate cut round the mouth for the capstone to sit in. The report does not say which three, and the entry for Tomb 158 mentions none, so the model draws it without one (Chap. 8).

Under the stone the tomb stayed empty. Laona tombs were not filled with earth after a burial; the last act was to put the capstone back (Chap. 8). A body laid in the tomb decayed in the air of the closed shaft, and Tomb 158 shows it: the last man’s ribs had collapsed downwards and forwards into the space his soft tissues left, which does not happen to a body packed in earth (Chap. 9).

Sliding a slab of that weight aside would have taken three or four people, or levers, so on our reconstruction every burial and every later visit to the bones began with a group shifting the stone and ended with it dragged back. At Vathyrkakas the capstone of Tomb 73 had a hole cut through it to help with the handling.

The bones belong to at least nine people (Chap. 9). Only the last was found as he had been laid. Individual A, as the report calls him, was a man of 18 to 28. He lay across most of the floor, curled on his right side and turned slightly onto his back, his head towards the east. His left arm was bent across his body with the hand resting on his right upper arm; his right arm and both knees were tightly folded; his right foot rested on the bones heaped at the west end (Chap. 9, Pl. 49.5). He had a healed fracture at the base of one thumb, the injury known as Bennett’s fracture; Lorentz and Casa (2020) discuss whether such breaks at Laona came from falls or from fists. As he lies on the plan he takes up about 1.15 m from head to foot.

The other eight survive as gathered bones. The four adults were three men and a woman: a man whose skull lay in the upper heap facing west (Cranium B); a man of 16 to 22 whose skull lay at the west end (Cranium D); a woman of 18 to 25 whose skull fragments lay in the lower heap (Cranium E); and an adult man counted from his other bones, who on our reading is the long bones, hip bones and shoulder blade gathered along the north side. The four children were an infant of about a year, an infant of one to two, and two children of six or seven, one of them represented by fragments of skull (Cranium C) (Chap. 8; Chap. 9).

Nine is a large number for Laona. The average tomb there held 4.5 people, and the tombs with children 6.67. Only Tomb 125, with ten, held more; Tomb 159, next door, also held nine (Chap. 9). The preliminary report on the seasons of 2001–2004 counted at least six people and 254 shell beads in Tomb 158 (Crewe et al. 2005), and Winkelmann (2020, p. 375) repeats those figures. The final publication’s figures, nine people and 267 beads, replace them, and they are the figures used here.

The rule at Laona was to lay the body on its right side, tightly flexed, head to the south-east, with the heap of earlier bones to the north-west (Chap. 8). Tomb 158’s long axis is drawn east–west, while Lorentz describes the heads as pointing south-east (Chap. 9); the model keeps the tomb on its east–west axis, and this report describes the heads as pointing east. The eight earlier dead are shown laid in the same way before their bones were moved. That is the cemetery’s rule applied to them, since none of their first positions was recorded.

A Laona tomb was used again and again, and the earlier dead were not taken out to make room. Once a body had decayed, its bones were gathered and stacked inside the same tomb in a set order: the small and irregular bones first, then the long bones on top, laid parallel to the nearest wall, and the skulls set on the pile or beside it (Chap. 9). In Tomb 158 the stack fills the western third of the floor and was built in two levels. The lower level has long bones lining the west and north walls and the skull of the young woman. The upper level has the skulls of the man of 16 to 22 and a child of six or seven, with long bones running north-west to south-east. A second, looser group lies along the north side in front of the last man’s arms: long bones lying east–west, a hip bone, a shoulder blade and a vertebra, all from one adult (Chap. 9, Pls 49.5–6). Apart from the last man’s displaced foot, nothing in the stacks was still articulated.

How long the tomb stood between visits is not known. In two other Laona tombs, 192 and 207, parts of bodies had been moved while only partly decomposed, which suggests that a tomb could be reopened within months of a burial rather than years (Lorentz 2014). Tomb 158 has no such evidence of its own, so the interval there is unknown. Nor does the stack record the order of the early burials: once bones are gathered, nothing shows who went in first. What can be read is that the lower level was built before the upper one, and that the last man was laid in after both.

The timeline in the model is our reading. By our reckoning the floor, 1.45 x 0.89 m, has room for one adult laid flexed, with perhaps a small child, and not for two adults side by side, so each adult had to go to the stack before the next went in. That gives nine burials and four clearances, 19 events in all from the cutting of the shaft to its excavation, in an order fitted to the two levels of the stack and the skulls found in each. A simpler reading, with one clearance for each level, would need bodies to overlap on the floor, and the model does not use it.

The excavators registered 289 objects from the tomb. 281 came from the intact burial layer at the bottom; the other 8 came from the silt and collapse above, where water and the looters may have moved them (Chap. 8).

There is one whole pot, and nothing else of clay but five sherds. The wealth of Tomb 158 was worn on the body: 267 shell beads, three faience beads, two stone pendants, three bone pendants and two pieces of copper, nearly all of them parts of two necklaces. Bronze Age tombs in Cyprus would later receive pottery by the dozen; here the dead went in with what they wore.

Dentalium shells are the tusk shells of a small sea mollusc. They grow as narrow tubes, so a bead needs only to be cut to length. Of the 267 in Tomb 158, 68 lay with one cruciform pendant and 181 with the other; 13 more were scattered through the burial layer. Of the 5 from the fills above, 3 are marked on the plan near the last man’s pelvis, though the catalogue assigns them to the silt over the burials, and 2 lay higher up (Chap. 8; Chap. 12). For the publication the two groups were restrung as five strands of decreasing length (Pl. 50.8). The cords have decayed, so the model shows each group as a loose coil.

The model keeps every object at true size, so in the default view the pendants and beads are specks in a shaft nearly two metres deep; the close-look view shows them.

Two objects lay with the last man where they were probably put. A round pebble about 3.4 cm across sat at his pelvis (Pl. 50.9). By his hands, among the bones of the north group, a small painted flask lay on its side with its neck to the east (Chap. 8, Pl. 49.5). Three shell beads are marked on the plan beside the pebble, though the catalogue assigns them to the silt above the burials.

The flask is the only whole vessel in the tomb, and nothing like it has been found at Souskiou. It stands 17.5 cm high on three curving feet, one of them lost, with a short cylindrical neck 4 cm across at the rim and a body that tapers downwards like a cone. It is Red-on-White ware, the painted pottery of the period, perhaps of the lattice-decorated kind: a buff slip, red bands round the rim and the body, squares left in reserve and filled with dots on the lower body and the feet, and a red base (Chap. 10, Pl. 50.10). Whether it held anything is not recorded. Lying where it did, it probably went in with the last man.

The pebble belongs to a pattern that runs through the cemetery. At Laona the dead of both sexes wore a pendant on the chest, but what lay at the pelvis differed: figurative pendants went only with women, chipped stone only with men (Chap. 21). The last man has a pebble there. The three pieces of chert from the burial layer are not marked on the plan, and the model puts them with the men on the strength of that pattern. The excavators single out three lavish burials at Laona: Tomb 237, a woman with eight figurative pendants; Tomb 221, a woman with a faience necklace; and Tomb 158’s last man (Chap. 21).

Four sherds from the burial layer belong to Red-on-White vessels of the same period. One joins a deep bowl, number 455, from Tomb 159 next door, and other pieces of that bowl turned up in the looters’ spoil and the topsoil. The excavators suggest that pots were broken and their pieces shared between neighbouring tombs; the alternative is that fragments travelled between the tombs later (Chap. 8).

The two necklaces lay where the bone stacks met the last man’s limbs. Necklace 1 lay on the north side, among the bones of the north group and beside his arms: a cruciform pendant of pale green picrolite (407), 68 shell beads, a copper spiral bead (428) and, on top of the bones, a curved piece of copper that may be a pin (429), with a small bone pendant (430) close by. Necklace 2 lay at the west end, beside the skull of the man of 16 to 22 and against the last man’s lower leg: a smaller cruciform (431), 181 shell beads and the three faience beads (Chap. 12; Pls 49.5, 50.8).

The excavators read the same plan in two ways. In the chapter on the beads, necklace 2 lay “beside a male cranium in the bonestack” and necklace 1 “in a discrete bonestack”, and each was moved together with its wearer when the bones were stacked (Chap. 12). In the closing synthesis, a table of grave goods by body puts both on the last man, one at his elbow and one at his knee, and the text says that the copper and both necklaces “can quite possibly be associated with this individual” (Chap. 21). Winkelmann (2020, p. 375) splits them, giving the larger cruciform to the last man and the smaller to the young man.

The plan allows all three, because each group lies on stacked bones and against the last man’s body at once. The model follows the chapter on the beads: necklace 1 travelled with the man of the north group, and necklace 2 stayed with the young man. A switch in Explore mode gives the other reading, in which the last man wore both and they went in at the final burial. It changes the labels and the timeline. It does not move anything, since the positions are the plan’s in both.

If the bead chapter is right, the people who handled the dead at Laona kept each person’s jewellery with that person’s bones, so that a necklace followed its wearer into the stack. One detail bears on how long the larger pendant was worn: the perforation of cruciform 407 shows no wear from a cord (Chap. 13), which may mean it was new, or little worn, when it went into the tomb.

The three faience beads are short tubes of up to four segments, the largest about 9 mm long, under a turquoise glaze (Pl. 49.2). Faience is a body of ground quartz glazed in firing, a material of Egypt and the Near East, and these beads are among the earliest faience found in Cyprus. At Laona segmented faience beads appear in Period I/II, about 3000 BC, in three tombs only: 138, 158 and 221 (Chap. 12). Their glaze contains tin, which marks them as foreign, and they were almost certainly imported (Chap. 12; Kassianidou and Charalambous 2019, Chap. 16). The plan marks the faience number in two places, one by the young man’s skull and one by the last man’s torso, while the text puts all three beads in one tight group with necklace 2. The model puts two at the first mark and one at the second.

The tin has a history of its own. A similar bead from Vathyrkakas was judged by Shortland and Tite to be an intrusion from the Late Bronze Age. The beads from Tomb 158 come from a burial layer that was never disturbed, under a Chalcolithic burial, and they contain tin too, which supports the early date (Chap. 16).

The two pieces of copper are the only copper from the Laona cemetery (Chap. 21). Number 428 is a strip of metal coiled into a tight tube about 2.5 cm long, nine turns in all, with the mineralised remains of a strand still inside it, so it hung on something (Crewe et al. 2005, pp. 51–52; Knapp 2008, p. 95). The excavators publish it as a bead of necklace 1; Steel took it for a spiral hair ring (cited by Knapp 2008, p. 95). It has a twin from Vathyrkakas Tomb 23, and spirals like it went on into the Bronze Age, when about thirty were found at the neck of a single Middle Cypriot burial (Chap. 12). Number 429, a curved rod in two joining pieces thickened at one end, is published as a pin with a question mark; the preliminary report described six curved fragments, perhaps of a ring-shaped pendant (Crewe et al. 2005, pp. 51–52, 65). The model follows the final publication, and the object’s card gives the other reading.

The excavators allow that the two pieces may not have been of pure copper or made locally (Chap. 21). The model makes no claim about the metal’s composition or source and shows both simply as green, corroded copper.

The two cruciform pendants are small. Number 407 is about 2.9 cm high, number 431 about 1.9 cm (our measurements from the plates). Each is a human figure reduced to a cross: a head pierced or looped for hanging, and arms stretched out to the sides. They are carved in picrolite, a soft blue-green stone of the serpentine family that occurs as pebbles in rivers draining the Troodos mountains and takes a good polish. The Laona settlement had its own workshop for cruciforms (Chap. 13).

These are pendants, of the type the excavators number 3A, much smaller than the cruciform figures for which the Cypriot Chalcolithic is known, such as the 7.9 cm picrolite figure in the Metropolitan Museum; the smaller picrolite figurines show the range. Figurative pendants of Type 3 came from only seven tombs at Laona (Chap. 13).

Cruciforms have long been read as women’s objects, figures of a woman giving birth worn as charms in childbirth. In Tomb 158 both lie with men: with the last man, or with the young man of 16 to 22 and the man of the north group, whichever reading of the necklaces is preferred. Winkelmann (2020, p. 352) found cruciforms buried with children and with adults of both sexes. Two pendants from one tomb cannot settle what the figures meant. They do show that at Laona men wore them as well as women.

After the last man was laid in, the capstone went back on, and nothing shows that the tomb was opened again in antiquity. Fine silt washed in round the edges of the stone and settled over the burials up to 0.55 m deep; this is fill 158.3, the burial layer. Over it formed 0.58 m of silt, soft in the centre and compact at the edges (158.2). Then the capstone broke and fell into the shaft with boulders and angular stones, some perhaps from a neighbouring tomb, in a layer about half a metre thick (158.1). What broke it is not known (Chap. 8, Pl. 49.1).

In modern times, before the excavations of 2001–2004, looters worked over the Laona outcrop; the gouges left by picks, and by machines, where capstones were prised up still mark the rock (Chap. 8). At Tomb 158 they dug into the collapse and stopped where the capstone fragments and boulders had packed hard. The burial layer under it was never reached.

The tomb was excavated in 2003 by the Lemba Archaeological Project, led by Edgar Peltenburg; the board in the excavation photograph reads “SL03 T158.3 H9” (Pl. 50.2). A preliminary report appeared in 2005 and the full publication in 2019 (Crewe et al. 2005; Peltenburg, Bolger & Crewe 2019).

The excavators read the Laona tombs as a “very preliminary stage” of social inequality: some tombs and some people received far more than others, in the same period (I/II) as the large Tomb 73 at Vathyrkakas (Chap. 21). They also propose that some people specialised in the dead, handling the bones and controlling who could open a tomb. Ordered stacks, and necklaces kept with the bones of their wearers, are the kind of evidence the idea rests on, and Tomb 158 has both (Chap. 21). The arrangement did not last. In the settlement’s Period II the dead were again buried among the houses, in graves without goods, and the making of cruciforms stopped (Chap. 21).

In the longer history of the Cypriot tomb, Tomb 158 is an early form. One room cut in the rock, reached from above, was used by a group over time, with the earlier dead moved aside to make room for the next. Priscilla Keswani (2004, p. 70) names the bottle-shaped shaft tombs of Souskiou as local forerunners of the Bronze Age chamber tomb, which would add an entrance shaft and a doorway into a room at the side (see Bronze Age chamber tombs). Tombs entered from the side appear in the Late Chalcolithic at Kissonerga, but the collective rock-cut tomb is older: Laona has it in the Middle Chalcolithic.

Much of the model is excavated. The shape of the shaft along its long axis, its mouth and floor, the fissures, the fills and the capstone fragments are on the published plan and profile. So are the bones, the two levels of the stack, the north group and the last man’s posture, and so is every one of the 289 objects, by number and kind. The positions of the objects marked on the 1:10 plan are our measurements from it, good to about 5 cm, and the sizes we give for small objects are read from the plates, to within about 15 per cent.

Some of it is reconstruction. The north–south profile of the shaft is drawn from the plans of the mouth and floor. The size of the capstone is inferred from the mouth and the surviving fragments, and its thickness is a guess. The first positions of the eight earlier dead follow the cemetery’s rule, and the order of the nine burials and four clearances is ours. Objects the plan does not place, the bone pendants 1774 and 1775, the scattered beads, the sherds and the chert, are put where Laona practice suggests. The spoil and labour figures are our estimate.

The view called “Where positions come from” colours every object by its source: the plan, the text, the cemetery’s practice, or an estimated count. Each object’s card says the same in words.

The date is the least certain figure. No radiocarbon date has been run on the tomb or its bones; its date, about 3000 BC, rests on the painted pottery, the tripod flask among it, and how long the tomb stayed in use is unknown (Chap. 8; Chap. 10).