Abstract:

The eighth season of the joint Croatian-American interdisciplinary investigations of the Roman villa in Soline Bay on Sv. Klement near Hvar took place in June 2014. The objective was to continue the excavation of the production area of the villa. One trench was excavated, trench 14 (extension of trench 11 from 2013), which extended over roughly 14 m2 and contained 15 stratigraphic units. We documented segments of two roughly parallel walls in N-S direction and a poorly preserved mortar floor between them. Wall SU 14006 was the continuation of the wall 11012 found in 2013 and it extended further to the south, outside of the trench. It is 0.60 m (2 Roman feet) wide and built of fairly regular stone ashlars, set in mortar. The other wall SU 14015 was 0.20 m wide and of similar construction. The mortar floor had a subfloor of rough stones in thick mortar. Numerous fragments of wall plaster, some with traces of polychrome paint (red, white, black), were found in the layer above the mortar floor, together with some collapsed wall and roof building material. A very large number of white limestone tesserae of various sizes (86% large, rectangular) was found in the six layers above the collapsed material and the floor. The ceramic finds include a fragment of a Hellenistic fish plate, late Roman African and Phocaean sigillata, Aegean and African kitchenware and amphorae. There were also numerous sherds of Roman dolia and several fragments of ceramic beehives. There were fragments of Roman glass and a small tessera of blue glass paste. Among the metal finds, there were 6 coins and a bronze ring. The most significant find was a complete, broken bronze pitcher, found in situ along the western face of wall SU 14006. There is evidence of continuing production and storage area. The findings of polychrome frescoes and fine tesserae indicate some residential spaces, which may be from an earlier, probably early imperial, building phase. Those spaces could have been re-purposed in late antiquity.

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