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Excavations at Sparta: the Roman stoa, 1988–91 Preliminary report, part 1: (b) Hellenistic and Roman pottery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2013

Donald M. Bailey*
Affiliation:
British Museum

Abstract

The pottery described comes from areas of the Roman stoa that were selected by the excavators as important. Most groups contained quantities of local tiles, glazed or unglazed, and large numbers of unidentifiable body sherds. The vast majority of the pottery was locally made and is micaceous, normally very micaceous. Its normal colour is orange of various shades, but it can be a light brown; fired in a reducing atmosphere the body is grey, and this can have a grey slip. There was considerable use of black glaze and red-to-brown slip on Laconian vessels, both coarse and fine; black glaze seems to have been in use at Sparta well into the 1st cent. AD. The generally late hellenistic and Roman Laconian vessels from these contexts are largely unknown archaeologically, and dating is thus at a preliminary stage. Very few imports were found, but these represent the main dating criteria. The hellenistic and Roman pottery found in the Roman stoa, limited as it is, can only be regarded as material for the beginning of a corpus of the many local forms of the period.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1993

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References

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