Wine Cups and the Early Chronology of Apollonia Pontica: Archaic Pottery from the Island of St. Kirik

Abstract

In the last 15 years, the excavations at the island of St. Kirik offshore from Sozopol (ancient Apollonia Pontica) on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast have yielded thousands of fragments of Archaic Greek pottery, including a sizeable collection of drinking cups from the last decades of the 7th and the early 6th centuries BC – North Ionian hemispherical cups (“bird bowls”, “meander bowls”, etc.) and early types of South Ionian cups with everted rims (“Ionian cups”). The comparison with the assemblages from Istros, Berezan, Orgame, and Taganrog, all of them presumably earlier than Apollonia – with a traditional foundation date c.610 BC, reveals practically an identical repertoire. A couple of “anomalous” fragments that are even earlier, from the middle or third quarter of the 7th century BC, have parallels only at Berezan. The paper argues that there are grounds to suggest an earlier chronology of Apollonia’s foundation, closer to that of the other early Ionian apoikiai.