OPP (Other People’s Pottery)

This week, we’ve started a small project looking at “other people’s pottery.” This has become a bit of a habit for me and my collaborate Scott Moore this summer. We’ve gradually expanded the system that we adapted for reading pottery from Pyla-Koutsopetria and Polis to other project. First, we hung out this summer for a few weeks at Isthmia and now we’ve come back to Larnaka where we’re reading some material from salvage excavations in the city in 2014 and 2015. 

The exact context of this pottery is a bit unclear, but there is a lot of it. And any time Scott and I encounter a lot of pottery, we begin to think about how this pottery can speak to larger issues of trade, regionalism, and connectivity. We’ve only spent a few hours with this pottery (which apparently needs to published in some way by the spring of 2025!), but we’ve already started to compare it to our material from our survey at Pyla-Koutsopetria about 10 km to the northeast and the site of Panayia-Ematousa about 10 km to the west. In other words, we hope, at very least, this pottery can contribute to our understanding of Roman material in the Larnaka.

We also hope that today is a bit cooler than yesterday (or that we do a better job managing our water intake, our electrolytes, and our food)!