CORFU-KANONI ROAD - 2001

Corfu- Kanoni road. Pachi property. A. Vaxovanou (Η’ ΕΠΚΑ) reports on continuing excavation of a plot with continuous activity from Classical to Roman times. Evidence for the start and end dates in the area so far explored are respectively provided by an early fifth-century stand depicting a gorgoneion plus a group of fine Classical pottery, and Byzantine and early modern glazed wares and domestic pottery.

The topmost construction level, beneath a destruction layer, contained Roman walls and a large quantity of domestic pottery (coarse vessels, basins, frying pan handles, and handles and bases of transport amphorae), plain lamps and Roman Republican coins (of the second and first centuries BC).

The Hellenistic level immediately beneath contained evidence of dense construction in a unified building complex. Building materials were re-used from earlier phases, and walls founded on their Classical predecessors following the same orientation. In the east part of the excavation area, the southwards extension of the Hellenistic house excavated in 2000 was exposed. This building consists of three rooms with a courtyard to the east which had a clay and cement floor and contained a well and a terracotta water channel. On the west side of the plot lay the continuation of the main road, which proved to have a bedding of gravel, pebbles and clay: it remained in use throughout the Hellenistic periods, with pottery including third- to second-century kalyx-bowls, handles and bases of transport amphorae, Megarian bowls, loomweights (some stamped), terracotta figurines, bronze coins (300-229 BC), and a silver coin of the age of Alexander the Great.

Classical remains are more fragmentary, damaged by Hellenistic construction. Parts of two rooms of a house were identified. In one partition wall was a hoard of fourth-century silver coins (staters and drachmae of Corinth, and a stater of Apollonia). Built into the external wall was a tripartite terracotta drainage structure to remove rainwater (two terracotta channels and an apron). Finds include fine pottery, fifth-century transport amphorae, small aryballoi and other miniature vessels, a stand with figure decoration, a red-figure krater and black-glaze lamps.

Fill introduced when a modern cistern in the southeast of the plot went out of use contained a large quantity of stone tools of similar type, along with modern domestic pottery and glazed ware, bronze items, loomweights and black-glaze sherds. The source of this fill, and thus the tools, is unknown.