ARGOS. - Nannopoulos plot - 2007

Argos, Nannopoulos plot. A. Pariente (EfA/Lyon) and Ch. Piteros (Δ' ΕΠΚΑ) report on the 5th season of excavation. Clearance of the agora cemetery provided no further possibility of determining its chronology in the absence of funerary offerings and definable limits. The 6 tombs discovered in 2007, like their predecessors, were uniformly oriented with the head to the SW and the feet to the NE. They housed the remains of a young adult buried in a pit protected by a wooden cover, 2 children buried in a shroud, an adult buried in a shroud, and the bones of an adult interred in a coffin but found in secondary disposition due to the burial of a juvenile in the same pit. This practice, already in evidence in this cemetery, probably indicates that graves were not marked on the surface.

A limestone krepis continued to be exposed on the N side of the plot, and the E part of the monumental exedra was completely exposed along with its concrete floor. A single layer of fill covered the NE part of the monument and produced abundant pottery: some 20 lamps dating from the 1st half of the 4th−E6th Ct AD (Fig. 3) were associated with pottery of the 2nd quarter of the 3rd−E6th Ct AD. This fill included a fragment of a lion muzzle from a Cl terracotta gutter and an almost complete amphora, probably dating to the L5th or E6th Ct AD.

In the S part of the excavation area, the concrete floor of the exedra slopes gently to the edge of the ‘Byz disturbance’ previously encountered in the neighbouring plot. The brown earth layer of this ‘disturbance’ contained much L4th−E5th Ct and 6th Ct AD pottery.