areafirst investigated by Léon Heuzey (after whom one of the tombs is
named) and sporadically elsewhere in the north and north-east. Mounds
were, of course, only one form of burial style. Pits and cists represent
most of the‘lesser’interments.
Aside from the royal burials, a number of non-royal graves are worth
exploring more closely. One recently investigated grave complex provides
unusually rich evidence of mortuary practices. The‘Stenomakri’Toumba
at Vergina is a burial mound named after its elongated,‘oblong’shape. It
lies in the north-west part of the cemetery area of ancient Aigeai, some 200
mfromthe‘Great Tumulus’, and, when surveyed by archaeologists, was
still the second largest tumulus in the vicinity after the former (43.70 m x
23.40 m). It wasfirst investigated in 1981 by Chrysoula Saatsoglou-
Paliadeli, still under the watchful eye of Andronikos, and re-investigated
by A. Kyriakou in 2003–5. Like the‘Great Tumulus’,itiscomposedofa
number of separate burials with their own earthenfill, which have merged
into a single, cumulative structure. The earthen surround did not, how-
ever, protect the contents from pillage, perhaps during the historical attack
of the Gauls on Vergina in 274bc(Plut.Pyrrh.26), as well as in subse-
quent centuries. Despite these onslaughts, the complex of up to four
burials is among the most interesting as well as the most complete
Macedonian funerary inventories dating to the fourth centurybc.
Three of the burials were of men, all equipped with weapons, all
evidently senior military officers, judging by the associated artefacts
found in two cases (Tombs B andˆ) in funerary pyres above the roof of
a limestone ashlar cist; in one case on a mortuary bed. The interior of the
first cist (Tomb B), which was not big enough to contain an extended
human skeleton (1.42 m x 1.04 m x 1.00 m), was painted with red, white,
and blue pigments, with a plain scheme except for a frieze of ribbons and
garlands, hanging from imaginary and real iron nails. It was otherwise
empty. Among thefinds that eluded looters was a set of (now fragmentary)
polychrome water jars, of which there must have been at least ten in all,
together with a range of iron weapons—the blade of a sarissa, a spear head,
two or more javelins, an iron sword with a composite handgrip, upwards
of nine iron strigils, a gilded bronze wreath of myrtle leaves andflorals, an
iron horse bit, and three iron pins, associated with what is thought to have
been a wooden chest intended to contain the cremated bones of the
deceased. After the remains were put in place, an earthen mound some
20 m in diameter was raised over the grave. The excavator considers this
tomb to date some years before the middle of the fourth centurybc.^23
(^23) Kyriakou 2008.
Continuity and commemoration 309