SALAMIS - 2004

90 E. Venizelos Avenue (property of E. Gika, O.T. 81). M. Pologiorgi (ΚΣτ’ ΕΠΚΑ) reports the discovery of Middle Geometric to Late Roman remains on a plot which had previously produced fifth-century pithos burials.

A Middle Geometric slab cist with a pebble floor and containing a skyphos was largely destroyed by modern construction. Geometric sherds were also found in one large hollow in the bedrock, and Classical sherds in another.

A child burial in a terracotta larnax (fig. 1) contained a lidded pyxis (fig. 2), a black-figure lekythos and a black-glaze skyphos (dating the burial to the second quarter of the fifth century BC), while an enchytrismos in an amphora ( fig. 3) contained a lekanis and lid (fig. 4), an olpe, and a black-glaze skyphos of the first quarter of the century.

In the late Classical period the area was occupied by a workshop for purple dye from which a large quantity of shell survives. Shallow bedrock cuttings probably relate to the workshop.

Domestic pottery, beehives and a quantity of rooftile indicate a Late Roman farmstead. A long, east-west wall of unworked stone and spolia has a doorway with jambs of re-used limestone blocks from the bases of funerary monuments (fig. 5). A second wall likely made a corner with the first, but is broken by a later well. A probable retaining wall was found to the west. From fill (and perhaps later re-used) were the crowning block of a fourth-century Pentelic marble grave stele and a small part of the left side of what may be the body of the same stele with two lines of an inscription (ΔE [……] | Υ […...]).