The Southern Fountain House In The Athenian Agora Summary

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Jessica Paga's article, “The Southeast Fountain House in the Athenian Agora,” is an attempt to reconsider the accepted chronology of the Athenian Agora, specifically through examining the established estimated dates of the building of the Fountain House, and by comparing those dates to revised ones that she has extruded from her research and examinations of the site and its artifacts. More specifically, the Fountain House is commonly dated at approximately 525 BCE, whereas Paga believes that she has found significant evidence to suggest that more accurate dating would place its construction between 480 and 450 BCE. To this end, she provides circumstantial evidence across four main spectra; architectural evidence, evidence from ceramics and …show more content…

Relying on the assumption that the channels could not have been accessed at a date later than the construction of the Fountain House, and that debris could not have made its way into the channels or surrounding areas after construction, Paga seems to be able to provide rather compelling evidence to support her dating of the Fountain House at circa 480-450 BCE. Most convincingly, she notes a saltcellar and a black-gloss Vicup or kylix base (Figure 15, Pg. 372 and Figure 12, Pg. 370 respectively). Saltcellars “are generally associated with the first quarter of the 5th century and rarely appear before 500,” (Paga, 374) and Vicups are “a particular type of cup that was manufactured for a brief time, perhaps for only a single generation, and almost all of its examples date to the second quarter of the 5th century,” (Paga, 374). However, Paga never distinguishes why the black-gloss base is “more likely,” (Paga, 374) from a Vicup than a less esoteric kylix, leaving reason to doubt the evidence she extrapolates from the shard originating as a part of a Vicup. Furthermore, and more significantly, the assumption Paga makes with regards to debris access to the areas the ceramics were found seems unfounded. While she is more than comfortable with the assumption, she does not identify why “such a hypothesis—that the later sherds [sic] represent an intrusion...seems highly unlikely,” (Paga, 376), she only identifies that—to her—it does. In contrast to this, Paga's supporting of her ideas with evidence from the pipelines themselves is more potentially more

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