Kilns, Pools, and Lamps at Polis on Cyprus

At the end of last week, we finally got a bit of momentum for our work here on Cyprus. We’re in the awkward position of trying to wrap up some work we did straddling the pandemic and a new project partly anchored in analysis that we almost a decade ago(!). 

This week, we’ve shifted entirely to attempting to sort out the relationship between several superimposed Roman levels that we hoped might offer a context for a cache of Roman lamps. Instead we discovered that we probably had a multiphase ceramic workshop area with a kiln, some pools likely for levigating pottery, and a ton of wasters. None of these features necessarily correlated with the cache of Roman lamps (although nothing we’ve found so far tells us that these features are definitely NOT related to the lamps). In fact, the lamps appear to be in secondary context.

The pool consists of a series of ceramic tiles forming a kind of edge or coping. Similar pools have been associated with levigating (or preparing) clay for being turned into pots elsewhere in the Mediterranean. What’s baffling is that this pool is almost immediately over the top of the kiln. In other words, the kiln and the pool could not have functioned at the same time, despite both likely serving in the production of pottery. This tells us that the site has at least two phases, both, it would appear, associated with ceramic production. We’re eager to return to the material found in the kiln itself which seems to have been filled after its abandonment. Our preliminary read suggested that it was largely Roman period material from the 1st or 2nd century AD, but this will almost certainly reward greater scrutiny since the collapsed kiln was buried by the pool and an associated wall.

Of course, the cache of lamps, which led us to study the site in the firm place, seem to be from a fill that is later than the abandonment of the pool and perhaps even tied to the leveling of the area and the construction of a large Early Christian basilica. We’ll still study and publish this cache though and compare it the lamps from elsewhere in the area. There may be reason to connect these lamps with the kiln (or as yet undiscovered kilns contemporary with the levigation pool) as we know that several of the maps came from the same mold, but represented different generations (that is, it was possible to recognize that the lamps are from the same mold, but that the mold itself is breaking down over time). Such a concentration of similar lamp forms and the same mold may well suggest production.