The Date of the Third Period of the PNYX

Q~, N December 8 of 1930, Homer Thompson began a new archaeological investigation of the ancient Athenian Pnyx. Excavation within the assembly place proper would continue until June 13 of the following year, supervised by Thompson and sponsored and advised by Konstantinos Kourouniotes, then Director of the Greek Archaeological Service, who had sunk test trenches into the site earlier in the century. Although subsequent years saw further excavation on the hill, the only additional work done within the assembly place was conservation of walls and redistribution of fill to provide a more vivid picture of the monument's original appearance. Thompson's six months of work, analyzed and reported in detail in the first number of Hesperia year later,1 form the basis for the modern conception of the meeting place of the Athenian Assembly. Kourouniotes and Thompson presented evidence for three distinct periods of the assembly place: the original phase, arranged in the normal manner of a theater, with the seating on the natural slope of the hill; and two subsequent phases in which the orientation of the structure had been reversed. Epigraphical and literary evidence place the first phase in the first half of the 5th century, and construction of the second phase can be dated near the end of the 5th century on the basis of pottery recovered from the associated fill.2 The chronology of the last phase, however, has proven a thorny problem. Here, too, the primary evidence is pottery from the fill that was brought in to raise the level of the auditorium; but the story told by that pottery is anything but straightforward. The excavators encountered the fill of Period III almost everywhere they dug within the auditorium. They extracted about 150 baskets of pottery from their trenches, most of it dating within the 4th century B.C. But a fairly substantial minority of the material12 baskets (8%)-was Roman, and Roman lamps accounted for about 80 (13%) of the 600 lamps found. They noted that Roman material was concentrated in the area behind the megalithic wall that retained the fill, at the northern ends of their trenches A, C, and D (Fig. 1), but its position, deep below the surface and sometimes lying on the bedrock itself, persuaded them that it was not intrusive, and they therefore concluded that the third phase of the monument was of Roman date. Additional support for this conclusion came from comparisons between the megalithic retaining wall and Roman masonry in Athens, and