An archaeological survey in the area of Kattavia, Southern Rhodes
In June 1994, with financial support from Generalkonsul Gösta Enboms Fond, the Danish Institute at Athens initiated a landscape survey in the area of the village Kattavia in Southern Rhodes, the part of the island, where two members the Danish expedition to Rhodes (from 1902 to 1914), the archaeologist Karl Frederik Kinch and his wife, the artist Helvig Kinch about 90 years earlier had excavated a settlement at Vroulia and investigated chamber tombs from the Late Mycenaean period (ca. 1400 to 1100 BC).
Dr.phil. Søren Dietz, the then director of DIA, directed the new field campaign in collaboration with the Ephorate of Antiquities of Dodecanese, represented by Dr. Effy Karantzaly, and the National Museum in Copenhagen. Mag. art. Mette Korsholm was field director, and 11 students in Classical Archaeology from the Universities in Copenhagen and Aarhus carried out the fieldwalking. The finds were recorded by John Lund and Maria Berg.
The survey covered an area of about five square kilometres in the Kattavia Valley. which is surrounded by mountains and in Antiquity presumably had a central lake. The finds testify to the changing use and settlement patterns of the area from the Stone Age to Late Antiquity and beyond, and the project managed to identify settlements and burials from the Mycenaean Period as well as locating later settlements on the slopes of the valley, including a flat-topped hill to the east of the presumed lake, which is believed to have been the centre of the ancient deme, i.e. a unit of local governing.
The most exiting finds were a workshop for Early Archaic (7th c. BC) relief-decorated storage jars, and a kiln site for the making of Rhodian transport amphorae, i.e. ceramic vessels of a standardised shape used for the transportation of wine and other foodstuffs. The presence of one or more kilns was revealed by a large concentration of mis-fired amphora sherds scattered over a slope close to a gorge – presumably in Winter the bed of a small river, which flows into the sea a couple of kilometres towards the east. The Kattavia workshop is one of the first documented amphora workshops hitherto found in Rhodes, which judging by the associated finds was active in the first century BC and AD.
