Episode 8 of Emerging Cypriot, "Wall on Vigla," is now available on-line. This episode deals with what I felt was one of the most exciting discoveries we made last summer. The area had suffered torrential rains about 6 weeks before we arrived. These downpours had stripped away a layer of soil, exposing the remains of a Late Roman wall encircling the heights of Vigla. One of our senior staff members convinced the British RAF
to fly over the site and take low level digital photos of the area and this wall showed up quite clearly in the photos. To me, this was a great discovery, until we stopped and tried to reconcile this Late Roman wall with the scads of Classical and Hellenistic pottery on Vigla. To further complicate matters, our resistivity survey on Vigla seemed to reveal the outlines of a Late Roman Basilica which fit in nicely with the wall. But the pottery?
There is no doubt about the pottery, and I am not saying that just because I was the ceramcist, but because the forms present are ones that are readily identified by anyone who has seen only a little Hellenistic and/or Classical pottery. To settle this problem, we asked for and received permission to conduct limited soundings to "ground-truth" the resistivity results. It promises to be an interesting summer.
RSM
Ancient History Ramblings 