MOCHLOS - 2009

Informations Générales

Numéro de la notice

1791

Année de l'opération

2009

Chronologie

Âge du Bronze - Bronze Ancien - Bronze Moyen - Bronze Récent

Antiquité - Hellénistique

Mots-clés

Production/extraction - Habitat - Pierre - Os - Métal - Outillage/armement - Lampe - Four - Maison - Temple - Voierie

Nature de l'opération

Fouille

Institution(s)

American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) (École américaine d'études classiques à Athènes)

Localisation

Toponyme
Ag. Nikolaos

Notices et opérations liées

1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2004 2005 2006 2007 2007 (1)2008 2008 (1)2008 (2)20092009 (1)2009 (2)2010 2010 (1)2011 2021

Description

Mochlos. J. Soles (ASCSA/North Carolina) and C. Davaras (Athens) report on a new excavation, aimed at the discovery of earlier, especially Prepalatial, remains under the Neopalatial settlement, exploration of the northern limits of the LMIB town and the completion of partly excavated areas. A new map of the whole site in all its phases was begun using a Differential GPS system (Fig. 1). Work below LMI levels across the site has identified parts of six Prepalatial houses and three streets in what seems to be an open-plan arrangement. In 2005 a workshop for stone vases was recovered; in 2009 an obsidian blade workshop was sampled below a LMI artisan centre (C.7). The latter has evidence for metalworking in gold: a small crucible, a gold strip fragment (like those from the Prepalatial cemetery) and two small bronze tools (one a punch capable of making dot repousse work). EMIII, MMII, LMI and Hellenistic levels made a wider appreciation difficult. Other isolated pockets of EMII were uncovered: all revealed a broad destruction horizon at the end of EMIIB. Three MMIIIA houses were recovered, two of which lay under the terrace in front of the LMIB Ceremonial Building (B.2), the main approach route from the Neopalatial settlement to a sunken shrine at its southwest corner. Remains of two people were identified here in 2008; it is believed to have been a centre of feasting and of communing with the ancestral dead. The MMIII houses were enclosed deliberately in the terrace and their presence marked by votives left thereon. In themselves, the houses were modest: small rooms and narrow rubble walls suited to single-storey structures. A large hearth lay outside one house, accompanied by a full set of cooking wares, and a three-sided prism (radiating whorl, two standing men and a long saw, a bucranium with horns ‘arrondies’) arguably made by the artisan who worked at the Atelier des Sceaux at Malia. The third MMIIIA house lay to the north of block C, on an extension of the main north-south street separating blocks B and C. After making a sharp turn to the east at the northwest corner of the block, this road turns again, continuing diagonally to the northeast. On the eastern side lay the house, badly damaged in the Hellenistic period. LMI floor levels were removed then; but a MMIIIA floor deposit, with abundant pottery, survived intact, as does its roadside façade. This in turn suggests that the street is of MMIIIA date and that the Neopalatial settlement was laid out at this early period. On the west side of the same road, the well-preserved house C.11 was completely excavated. The house is large, built on bedrock, with no earlier deposits below it. The entrance vestibule has an ashlar bench, an upright ashlar slab, perhaps designed to support a lamp, and a mortar carved from an ashlar block. An interior staircase led from the ground floor both down to a basement level and up to a first storey. It is not yet clear when the house was built, but it was certainly renovated in the LMIB period when ashlar was introduced as a building material on site. Badly plundered at the end of this period, it yielded only a few bronze tools and a stone sword hilt to suggest the wealth of its original contents.

Auteur de la notice

Don EVELY

Références bibliographiques

Unpublished field report, American School of Classical Studies at Athens