Larnaca's other significant collection, the Archeological Museum, stands a ten- minute walk away, north of Grigori Afxendiou (Mon-Fri 9am.Sept- June also Thurs 3-5pm; C£O.75). It's purpose-built, with excellent labelling and explanatory panels, but you get a feeling that the collection comprises pickings and leavings when compared to Nicosia's Cyprus Museum or the Pierides itself. It's certainly the impression you get when you step into the entry hall, where the management has been reduced to displaying copies of a famous statue of Artemis and funerary stele (the originals in Vienna and Berlin respectively).
Pre-eminent in the early part of the collection is a reconstruction of a Neolithic tomb from Khirokhitia, complete with a stone atop the corpse's chest indicating a fear of revenants from the dead. Later exhibits clearly illustrate how Late Bronze Age pottery, especially the so-called "white slip ware", prefig- ured the decorated dishes of the Geometric era. The fact that the latter were painted only on the outside (discounting the possibility that any inside designs were worn off by use) may indicate that they were meant to be hung up by their handles as decoration, like the woven tsesti or trivets of today.
Vast amounts of Mycenaean pottery in the so-called "Rude" (ie rustic) Style, dug up at adjacent Kition, demonstrate Argolid sertlement around 1200 BC; the prize exhibit is a fish krater (large wine goblet) from Ayios Dhimitrios near Kalavassos. Cypriot literacy dates to at least two centuries earlier, as evidenced by a display of Cypro-Minoan inscriptions (so far undeciphered), while a case of items imported towards the end of the Bronze Age demonstrates trade links at the same time; notice an ivory lamp in the shape of a fish. Back among indigenous ware, there's an unusual clay torch from pyla,and a clay brazier-pan from Athienou -perhaps meant to heat bedclothes or a small room. Terracotta highlights in the Archaic section include a horse and rider with emphasized eyes, plus a couple -possibly royal or divine -in a horse-drawn chariot.
