A Shaft and chamber tomb is a type of chamber tomb used by some ancient peoples for burial of the dead. They consist of a shaft dug into the outcrops of rock with a square or round chamber excavated at the bottom where the dead were placed. These chambers can consist of a single shaft and chamber like the Mexican tombs or sometimes quite elaborate as the Egyptians built.
Examples include those at Xemxija in Malta which are Neolithic and Dayeh-va-dokhtar tombs in Fars province of Iran. They were also employed by the Ancient Egyptians. The late pre-Classic and early Classic Era cultures of west Mexico (what are now the states of Colima, Nayarit, and Jalisco) used tombs of this kind and much of what little is known about these cultures is known from art objects found in these tombs. As a result, these early West Mexico cultures are sometimes referred to as the West Mexico shaft tomb culture.
Early Egyptian Shaft and Chamber Tombs
The first shaft and chamber tomb by the Egyptians known is the tomb at Mastaba This was a simple tomb with two shafts with a square chamber at the bottom of each shaft. But a new tomb in archeology is the Tomb of Osiris. The tomb of Osiris it a great example of this type of tomb. It was originally discovered in the 1880s but has not been fully sketched by a Spanish-Italian archeology team with the help from the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities which excavated the tomb further. Some say that this tomb dates back to 760-525 BC. It's hard to quite put an exact date but researchers were able to narrow it down by similar tombs. The Tomb of Osiris has three major shafts and has said to have eight chambers.
Western Mexico and Central American Tombs The Tombs of Western Mexico and Central America have similar tombs and in part of Ecuador and Columbia these practices were used until the 20th Century.