MOCHLOS - 2011

Mochlos. J. Soles (ASCSA/North Carolina) and C. Davaras (Athens) report on study in preparation for the publication of Mochlos IV.III. The House of the Metal Merchant and other Houses in the Neopalatial Settlement. Recent excavations have greatly enhanced knowledge of the town layout (Fig. 1), e.g. in the existence of a large ceremonial building, B.2, that extends across the width of Block B, a second manufacturing centre (C.7 and D.6), and more of the road layout, including the northeast divergence above Block C towards further houses above. Newly uncovered houses were located mostly along the shore (A.1, B.1, C.2 and D.1-4).

Most of the nine houses to be published are incomplete. Some (C.1, C.2 and C.6) were partly excavated by Seager; others, like C.1 or C.5, were partly destroyed by beach erosion, or, like B.4 and C.10, by Hellenistic reoccupation; another, C.4, lies beneath a Byzantine building and a modern cemetery; only one, C.3, the House of the Metal Merchant, is largely intact. Despite their varying states of preservation, all of these houses produced large quantities of Neopalatial pottery in well-stratified deposits. The whole Neopalatial sequence is represented: MM IIIA in two closed deposits in the southwest rooms of House C.10; MM IIIB at the bottom of the refuse accumulated in Plateia B outside C.2; LM IA, which includes the deposit beneath the Santorini tephra in C.1, and two deposits in C.3 that belong to the LM IA destruction caused by earthquakes associated with the Santorini eruption; and LM IB in every house, sometimes stratified above LM IA in two or more layers, or in the case of the kitchen in C.2 in as many as four different layers.