In 1934-1935, the first two years of work at Kourion, George McFadden and John Franklin Daniel excavated the cemetery of Kaloriziki as well as two tombs from the adjoining Mersinoudhia field. Located on the coastal plain to the southeast of the Kourion acropolis, Kaloriziki lies just to the east of the Ayios Ermoyenis cemetery. The tombs at Kaloriziki date from the Late Cypriot IIIB period to the Archaic period. The cemetery was the successor to the necropolis at nearby Bamboula and provides important evidence for the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age in Cyprus. Unlike at Bamboula, the corresponding settlement for this necropolis has not been located. Due to the terrain, the tombs were better preserved than those at Bamboula, although clandestine excavations had caused some disturbance.

The tombs produced large quantities of pottery, with two of the most common wares being the Late Bronze Age Proto-White Painted and early Iron Age White Painted I. These wares relate not only to pottery from Bamboula, but also to examples from Lapithos on the north coast of the island. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition had worked at Lapithos, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum excavated there in 1931. In his publication of Kaloriziki, J. L. Benson notes that the tombs show a connection to burial customs on Rhodes. Recent scholarship suggests a more complex relationship between the Kaloriziki and other sites in the Mediterranean.

Kaloriziki was revisited by George McFadden in 1952, in an attempt to locate a tomb which had been looted about a half-century earlier. The looters had been quickly apprehended, and the objects they found went to the Cyprus Museum. Among the tomb contents was a gold scepter that is one of the most famous objects in the Cyprus Museum and may be a symbol of Kourion’s establishment as a separate political entity. McFadden sought to find the original tomb, and he was assisted in his efforts both by Socrates Stylianou, who happened to be one of the men who had originally looted the tomb, and by older residents of Episkopi who remembered the incident. Thanks to information from Stylianou, McFadden found a tomb that fit the description. He was able to confirm that this was the original scepter tomb and even found some objects that the looters had missed.

There are nearly 700 objects from Kaloriziki in the Penn Museum’s collection; some 630 are ceramics. There are also bronze tools and pins, iron tools, bone or ivory pins, and stone objects. The objects come from some sixteen tombs, of both Late Bronze Age and Iron Age date.