ARTA - Anc. Ambracia - 2002

Arta (anc. Ambracia), 28 Priovolou Street (Papanikolaou property). I. Katsadima (ΙΒ' ΕΠΚΑ) reports the discovery of Archaic and Classical housing and part of the 1.4m-wide stone-paved alley which ran east-west through it. (Fig. 1: 277).

The earliest settlement phase (late seventh- to early sixth-century BC) is represented by two adjoining rooms, A and B, forming the northeast corner of a house bordered to the north by the alley and to the east by a road previously excavated on the Manou property. The walls were of irregular small-medium limestone blocks and stones. Doors in rooms A and B link to room Γ, of which only the eastern part is preserved (founded on fill containing Late Geometric and Archaic pottery). In the second, early fifth-century construction phase, a pebble floor was laid in rooms B and Γ over a flood deposit which contained architectural terracottas and sherds of the late sixth-early fifth century. The walls of room B rested on their Archaic predecessors, while room Γ was extended to the west (with bases for supporting columns located). Finds from the floor include black-glaze sherds, a terracotta figurine, a late third- or early second-century lachrymaterion, a bronze coin, bronze nails, nine loomweights, a few bones and fragments of glass vessels. The building continued in this form until the second century BC. Thereafter, three Byzantine pits were opened, two cutting the Classical floor. A 19th-century well damaged the western part of the structure.