The weather was hot and sunny, but since it was the last week most of us felt that it was time to give in the little extra, and the work proceeded in the steady pace that we have kept all along. The goal for this week was to tigh the loose ends together, to excavate the find layer in house 3, to finish house 2, to get some sense of what is going on at area D, the newly opened area to the west of House 1, and to bring all the documentation back home to Sweden in a state that will make it possible for us to initiate the report for 2004.

We had Karin, from the National Heritage Board, Archaeological excavations Department, joining us for the last week. She supervised the documentation and she helped us to correct the failures that we had made during our five weeks of excavation.

The results from the Scandinavian excavation of 2004 have been far better than our expectations, and as usual we have encountered features and artefacts that will help us to get an even better understanding of the indigenous household at Monte Polizzo around the 6th century BC. The most prominent find of this year is of course House 3, which surprised us with its delicate architecture in all its simplicity. House 3 can be described as a cassette house, very similar to the Vincenzo Tusa house at the Acropolis, which at this very moment is being explored in even greater detail by our Italian colleagues. Both structures is about 8 meters wide and has walls that are approximately 2 meters high, House 3 consists of larger building blocks and lacks the Roman or Medieval extensions. But the basic building principles dating back to the 6th century BC is definitely the same.

Activity Surface

We have also been able to finish most of House 2, the small platform mentioned in an earlier text, has been delimited. A rather large concentration of bones together with two “gettone”, small ceramic amulets, has made us suspect that it is related to sacrificial activities together with other household activities. It seems like what we normally label as religious activities has been a closely integrated part in the everyday life of the inhabitants of the 6th century Monte Polizzo.

To conclude, at Area A we now have a sequence of three different house types in a row, exploration trenches to both sides indicates that we now have a small quarter of houses that together with the results from other parts of the settlement will help us to reconstruct parts of the urban structure. We are now able to create distribution maps of finds from at least four households and this will give us substantial data for a good comparative analysis.

We will return next summer for further excavations at Monte Polizzo, but the actives at the site is far from over for this year, we still have a team of workmen who under the lead of two professional archaeologists will continue to uncover walls both near area A and B for three more weeks. The Italian team will continue their excavations into the beginning of September, and the rooms at our dig house are now filled with students from the University of Stanford who will work at the Acropolis until late August. The restoration of walls is set to October this year.

Please return to these pages soon, we will update the homepage with more information from the ongoing excavations on Monte Polizzo later this summer.