Pottery Problems at Pyla-Koutsopetria

One of the most vexing issues that we faced this winter as we tried to write up the excavation results we discovered a little handful of Roman pottery that was forcing us to re-consider the chronology of the architecture on Vigla. A number of the sherds came from foundation or fill deposits which are essential for dating architecture and occupation levels at the site.

We decided to pull these artifacts and check out identification of them. We have about 13,000 lots of pottery so this was looking like a pretty big task.  At the same time, we recognized that even a handful of sherds in a sensitive context could provide a date for the entire building. In fact, the construction style of the walls on Vigla provides no indication of the date for the structures there.

So we pulled all the possible Roman pottery from the stratigraphic units excavated on Vigla. Most of it was coarse and utility wares and, more importantly, most of it could easily date as early as the Hellenistic era. Even the two pieces of fineware ended up being relatively less diagnostic than our original readings would indicate.

While, on the one hand, this might sound like reading our pottery to match our historical chronology, on the other hand, it was exciting to begin the second order analysis of our own material. In other words, we were able to formulate new research questions on the basis of our excavations and mine our own material for answers.

At the end of the day, we were able to honestly eliminate Roman outliers from the half dozen problematic layers.