A 3750 year old murder mystery?

In about 1750BC, outside what is now the modern village of Alambra in central Cyprus, the dead body of a young woman was placed on its back on the floor of a small room, head turned to the right, left leg straight, and right leg flexed. Her arms lay by her side. She wore a cloak or shawl over her shoulders, fastened with a copper pin, and a necklace of vivid blue faience beads. On her chest were placed two copper ingots about the size and shape of a chocolate bar.

Was she the victim of a violent act?

Certainly, the house that she had been left in later burned down and her body – the whole room in fact – was buried under a thick layer of collapsed mudbrick walls, and charred wooden beams and wattle-and-daub roofing. Elsewhere in her prehistoric village, several more houses had been destroyed by fire – but not all of them.

One surviving house contained six valuable storage jars (each around 1.5m tall) still resting in position in the corner of a small room. A bronze chisel, a copper pin and other complete vessels lay at their bases. In another house that had been destroyed by fire, an elaborately decorated hearth was buried by the collapsed walls, and in a niche behind it, a figurine of a human was recovered, while in front of the hearth the excavators found another smaller human figure, a bronze pin, a spindle whorl and loom weight.

At around this time, the whole prehistoric village was abandoned, never to be re-occupied.

It is all a question of timing. Was the woman long dead when a forest fire swept through the village which had already been peacefully abandoned? Or did the woman die in a fire that consumed her village, before she could escape the flames? Or was she killed and her house, along with the others, destroyed by marauders?

Dr Andrew Sneddon, a director at Extent Heritage and Research Associate at La Trobe University, has been working on Cyprus since 1995. He has been Excavation Director at Alambra since 2012 and he is currently finalising his post-excavation report on the site (with Dr Tom Rymer, Greg Deftereos and Dr Lisa Graham). The mysterious female is a critical part of the analysis.

Andrew thinks he knows the answer. What do you think?