coming from wall or vault collapse can find their way into the upper parts of occupation debris.
(3) Material dumped in preparation of the site for construction, and always found below the lowest floor (or street) levels. This material will have accumulated over a shorter or longer period before construction and quite possibly at another location at Amheida. It may have varying degrees of internal homogeneity or heterogeneity. In general, it seems that the materials for a general spreading of debris to level the site for the construction of B1, B5, and S2 came from a single large source of debris that included building waste and ash along with ostraka coming from jar stoppers. These ostraka have dates ranging from year 1 to year 21 but not higher. It is thus possible that they could all belong to the regnal years of Diocletian (year 1 = 284/5). Years from 8 up, however, could also belong to other reigns, and we do not see any means of being certain that many of them are not from the reign of Constantine. For this reason we have given a full set of the possible years when publishing these pieces in the present volume, and in the corrections to volume 1 we have listed all of the possible years for such texts in that volume.
Alongside, or perhaps better on top of, this general layer of debris there are more restricted places in which we can find pre-construction dumped material, for example in a foundation trench. There are a few instances of such ostraka in this volume. More generally, it looks as if some of the sub-floor and sub-foundation debris in B6 and B7 may have been laid down in a separate operation before building began, and we have concluded that these buildings were either built a little later than B2 and B5, perhaps not until the 350s or, in the case of the south block of rooms in the church, even the early 360s. Alternatively, this material may date from renovation of B6 and removal or renewal of floor layers in the process (Fig. 3).
(4) Material dumped in spaces intended to hold waste or in places after they had ceased to be used, i.e., after the end of occupation; very often, such rooms had been blocked by walls built in doorways before this dumping began. Such material may come from contemporary use, but it may also represent debris found elsewhere and dumped, and such contexts may therefore contain more diverse contents. Rooms 9 and 10 contained some such debris, and Room 30 in B6 contained a couple of stratigraphic units of very mixed character.
The texts in this volume are thus arranged in four parts: (1) Ostraka coming from occupation and post-occupation layers, broadly speaking; (2) Ostraka coming from pre-construction dumped material; (3) Ostraka from the potentially post-occupation or renovation dump layers in Room 30 of Building 6; and (4) Ostraka coming from Area 4.1.
Figure 3. Plan of the baths (Building 6).
Α detailed discussion of the nature of the dumped material in Area 2.1, with more general reflections on the issues involved in working with dumped and recycled material, is given in an article of Rodney Ast and Paola Davoli, to which the reader is referred for a deeper analysis.2
In the following table, we list the stratigraphic units by area, categorize them briefly, and indicate which ostraka came from each of them. The reader is invited to read the full descriptions of the stratigraphic units in the database (www.amheida.com; in the on-line version of this book, links are provided), as they were prepared by the excavation supervisors at the time. These contain full details of their characteristics but are not written from the broader vantage point of the buildings as a whole. We need to point out that it is not always clear how to classify a stratigraphic unit, particularly where floors have not been preserved and it is not obvious whether dumped material belongs to a phase before or after construction; we have tried to preserve degrees of uncertainty in our description, but again the database provides far more detail.
TABLE OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS OF THE OSTRAKA, WITH DATES
This table represents an expansion of that given in O.Trim. 1, pp. 61–73, so that it includes all ostraka in the two volumes. The reason for this practice is partly that our analysis of the material in the previous volume has become more nuanced over the past five years, and partly that the common characteristics of the dumped and occupational layers across the whole of Area 2 have become clearer as excavation has been extended to B5, B6, and B7.
Ostraka are organized in this table by their archaeological context, Area, Room (where applicable) and S(tratigraphic) U(nit); the SU is a D(eposition) SU unless indicated to be a F(eature). The brief descriptions of context in the fourth column are given for all areas except 4.1 and 4.2. All contexts in those areas were thoroughly disturbed and without stratigraphic value. Room 3 belonged to the house to the south of B1.
Dates are discussed in the description of stratigraphy above, pp. 5–7, and in the notes to individual texts. Precise dates are generally based on regnal years or indictions, coupled with archaeological context. If internal evidence other than years helps indicate a date, this is noted in the edition of the individual texts. Texts without internal evidence of date are dated according to their archaeological context; it will be evident that some texts are probably older than these dates would indicate, particularly in the case of layers of material dumped in preparation for construction. Occupation layers, however, appear to have little or no older material except where a chinking sherd has come out of a vault or wall collapse and mixed with occupational debris.
In the column with text types we note if well tags have the Pmoun (Pm), Moun (M), or Hydreuma-Pmoun (Hyd-Pm) formula.
