Zur Chronologie des antiken Thera

Sondagen am Apollon Karneios-Heiligtum und in der Straße 11

Abstract

Large parts of the ancient city of Thera were excavated between 1896 and 1902 under the direction of Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen, but systematic archaeological investigations that would examine the city’s development were only carried out under Wolfram Hoepfner in the 1990s. Hoepfner’s team studied the architecture and made stratigraphic soundings in several areas of the city, which were, however, not all published. The aim of this paper is to publish, based on the old documentation, trenches at two points which provide exemplary insight into the city’s development from the Archaic period to the Roman Imperial period. The trench that was made in the sanctuary of Apollon Karneios in 1994 allows, for the first time, two large phases to be reconstructed for this complex. The sanctuary was probably built in the Archaic period and remodelled in the Hellenistic period when a large courtyard with a cistern and two secondary rooms were added. Two trenches dug in Street 11 in 1991 and 1992 show that the street and bordering buildings were not constructed before the Hellenistic period. A thick layer of pumice was fully exposed, which had been deposited on the bedrock and served as fill to support the street. Similar levelling layers of pumice have been found since the earliest excavations in several areas of the city, but they were usually not explored to the bottom and have not yet been systematically investigated to assess their date and function. At the end, it is argued that even confined investigations provide important results and insights and that further stratigraphic trenches should be dug in Thera in order to answer the many still open questions.