Cooking pots buried beneath a workshop floor suggest that workers in ancient Athens regularly turned to the gods for protection as part of their working lives, according to a new study.
The research, by Susan Rotroff of Washington University in St. Louis, was published Wednesday in the Journal of Roman Archaeology. It focuses on one room in a building just north of the Agora, the public square of ancient Athens. The building held a row of small shops used by craftspeople. Bits of pigment, paint pots, and metal waste were found pressed into its dirt floors.
The room kept 11 floor layers, spanning nearly 200 years from the late 400s to the mid-200s B.C. Beneath them, excavators found three buried “chytrai,” or common clay stewpots, each from a different century.
Three buried stewpots trace nearly two centuries of workshop rituals
The oldest, from about 425 B.C., was a tiny pot made on the nearby island of Aegina. It sat under an upside-down bowl that had been reused as a paint pot. The second, from the 4th century B.C., was a new, unused pot buried upright and whole. It held only a bronze coin. Rotroff noted that the red ring on its base looks like an eye bead, a charm Athenians used to ward off evil.
The latest pot, from the early 3rd century B.C., was buried in a trench with remains of a small fire ritual. Nearby lay an odd mix of items, including a well-worn grinding stone, a knife, a coin, and an upside-down bowl with a hole broken through it.
Ancient writers describe stewpots used to cook meals for the dead or to bless a new shrine. Rotroff said those uses do not fit these pots well. Other finds point to different purposes.
Curses or cleansing as Athenian workers sought protection from the gods
A pot two rooms away bore more than 50 names, was pierced by a nail, and held parts of a young chicken, all signs of a curse. Another, found near a crossroads, held puppy bones and may be tied to a cleansing rite.
Rotroff said a pot’s contents reveal its purpose, so the empty pots in this room remain a mystery. The workers may have been setting up shrines, cursing rivals or bosses, or seeking cleansing.
Still, the pattern shows that Athenian workers looked to the gods for protection again and again across generations, she wrote. She compared these small acts to modern habits like knocking on wood. She also said the study offers a way to spot similar signs of worship in other ancient workshops.
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