What Would You Say That You Do: Polis Final Report

This summer’s other major project was about a month at the site of ancient Arsinoe in the village of Polis on Cyprus. In keeping with the “What would you say that you do…” theme, I thought I would share our final report from our work with the Princeton Cyprus Expedition in Polis.

As many readers of this blog know, I’ve been working at Polis for nearly a decade now and patiently moving through the material associated with the “South Basilica” in the area of E.F2. Beneath that church, however, are the remains of an industrial area of the Roman and Hellenistic city of Arsinoe. These include a ceramic kiln, which may have produced lamps, and various other workshops perhaps associated with glass making, metallurgy, and the manufacture of terracotta figurines and statues.

The challenge that we’ve faced trying to understand these area is that much of these contexts are heavily disturbed. This was particularly the case in the area of H10 which we studied this past summer.

It would seem that many of the buildings were deliberately filled to build impromptu terraces, walls were built over, floor surfaces cut, features repurposed, and the entire area pieced by wells and drains. As a result, there are few contexts that are secure and when there are, they are very hard to associate with any particular feature or architecture. In short, it’s all a bit of a mess.

But in this mess are fragments of an industrial activity and thousands of sherds of Hellenistic and Roman pottery. This alone makes the area worth studying, even if the results aren’t a clear as we would like. Over the past season, we expanded our work from the area around the kiln to the east of the basilica (albeit at a level well below the apse) to the area southeast of the basilica where a number of buildings once stood. It’s slow and unsatisfying work, but here is our report from this past summer.

Polis 2024 Final Report.