The "dove vase", one of the loveliest creations of Cycladic art, is a large, disc-shaped marble plate with low walls and a row of 16 integral doves carved in the round (chisel marks are visible on the sides of the birds), across the bottom. The birds are interpreted as doves, a popular subject in the Cyclades, featured in beads, pendants, pinheads and even vases or pyxis handles.

The "dove vase" is the largest and best-preserved example of a rare category of marble vessels at present known only from Keros and specifically the site of Kavos-Daskalio, where fragments of such vases have been found.

The presence of the row of birds exactly across the diameter of the bottom obviates a practical function of the vessel. It may have been used for ritual offerings, as some researchers have proposed; its possible provenance from Kavos-Daskalio on Keros corroborates such a view, since we know that at this site objects of symbolic significance were deposited and intentionally broken, most probably in the context of specific rituals.