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Mycenaean feasting on Tsoungiza at Ancient Nemea
Hesperia, Spring, 2004 by Mary K. Dabney, Paul Halstead, Patrick Thomas
Distinguishing depositional features from large feasts can be suggested. The first is a general lack of soil matrix between sherds, since substantial quantities of pottery will be deposited at once. In a "dual-use" refuse pit, then, we can anticipate finding substantial areas of densely packed sherds and bones reflective of individual feasts, separated by layers associated with everyday activity, with fewer sherds and more soil matrix. A second feature that can be expected is less general weathering of surfaces, since fewer sherds will be exposed to the effects of weathering if they are dumped in a heap than if they are deposited in other ways.
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Obvious disparities and potential difficulties with the model should be considered, along with some reasonable modifications. First, the LH IIIA2 (early) deposit in EU 9 is not composed primarily of whole vessels, although it includes some vessels that are entirely or nearly complete, and it contains substantially more restorable pottery than, for example, a LH IIIB1 deposit excavated in EU 2. Second, the deposit is not chronologically homogeneous: nearly 5% of the sherds belong to earlier periods, a finding that does not appear to be the result of the excavators' cutting into earlier strata. By contrast, fewer than 1% of the sherds in the LH IIIB1 refuse pit in EU 2 belonged to earlier periods.
A rough index of mendable pottery in deposits with broken vessels is the percentage of sherds remaining after mending is complete. After sherds from earlier periods were excluded, the EU 9 deposit, after mending, contained roughly 79% of the initial number of sherds excavated; the EU 2 deposit had 86%. Not only were more joins found in the EU 9 deposit than in the EU 2 deposit, but numerous additional joins could have been made between body sherds in the former deposit had unlimited amounts of time been available. Moreover, only a portion of the EU 9 deposit was recovered, in contrast to the EU 2 deposit, which was completely excavated (the area to the east of EU 9 was private property not purchased for the project). This point has a bearing on any argument about the numbers of relatively whole pots and the amount of faunal material present. The deposit ranged in depth from 0.57 to 1.04 m in a 4 x 4 [m.sup.2] area; the total volume of the deposit was about 13.5 [m.sup.3]. The percentage of the total deposit excavated is not calculable, but the increasing numbers of sherds found as one moves eastward in successive 1-m-wide strips suggest that a very substantial portion of the deposit lies to the east of the excavated area. The basal levels of EU 9 (SU 1584, 1558, and 1559), which form an area of roughly comparable thickness across the trench, show this clearly: a 4-m-long strip along the E729 grid line running from N459 to N463 contained 699 sherds weighing 8.235 kg; the strip along the E730 grid line, 1,112 sherds weighing 13.616 kg; the strip along E731, 1,215 sherds weighing 14.670 kg; and the strip along E732, 2,297 sherds weighing 22.640 kg. Were the area to the east to be excavated, many more pieces could presumably be joined to those already excavated, since it was not unusual to find pieces from the same pot in the four adjacent units.
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