Orientalising pottery kilns at the catering college
A pottery-making centre of the orientalising period (Early Iron Age) recorded on the site of the Mérida catering college, on avenida del Río, on the western edge of the city beside the Guadiana. The work exposed a pottery kiln (designated EHM1) and, close by, contexts with orientalising material read as dumps from its own production.
- Type
- Alfar / hornos cerámicos
- Preservation
- —
- Protection
- Inventoried
- Coordinates
- 38.91731, -6.35906
- Photographs
- 0
What it is and what is left
Its interest is that it documents orientalising pottery production in Extremadura, a scarce type of site: most orientalising assemblages in the region are known from their pottery, not from the kilns that made it. The find is therefore several centuries earlier than the Roman founding of Augusta Emerita (25-24 BC) and belongs to the earlier protohistoric settlement of the middle Guadiana valley.
The preliminary study was published by J. Jiménez Ávila, F. J. Heras Mora, N. Sánchez Capote and A. Bejarano Osorio in 2013, in the proceedings of the 1st International Congress of SECAH (Ex Officina Hispana). It should not be confused with the early imperial Roman potteries of Mérida, which are other sites and cluster mainly in the south of the city (avenida de Lusitania, Camino del Peral, the Don Álvaro road).
It has not been possible to establish from the sources consulted whether anything remained visible on the surface after the excavation: the plot is now built up.
What each period left here
It reads downwards: each band is a period with fabric in this site, newest first, deepest last.
0 facts
0 photographs
Iron Age
This site has fabric from this period. Mérida has 1 more sites built in the same layer.
See the whole layer →Below the deepest layer of each site is the ground itself: what has not been excavated yet, or what left nothing built. The catalogue only claims what is documented.
A short walk from here
Straight-line distances, worked out from the coordinates of each site.