"This web site offers the full text of Household and City Organization at Olynthus, together with a database and interactive site plan of all the houses, rooms, objects, and graves from Olynthus. The book considers some of the relationships between house and city, and between household and community, as they were worked out in practice at Olynthus in northern Greece. Olynthus was occupied for a short period of time, primarily from 432 - 348 BC. It was then violently destroyed, leaving tens of thousands of artifacts on the final floors of its houses, and for the most part never reoccupied ... the archaeology of Olynthus offers a fuller and richer picture of Greek domestic and civic life than almost any other Greek site. The reconstruction of domestic and civic life at Olynthus offered in the book is based in part on analysis of the the architecture and artifacts from Robinson's excavations, recorded in his 14-volume series Excavations at Olynthus and in unpublished fieldbooks and other records. These were entered into a database [to permit the ... reassembling of] all the objects found in each room, reconstruct the activities that took place in different rooms and houses, and study the distribution of artifacts and activities across the site. The complete database is available on this site. The database is an essentially complete list of all the artifacts, houses, rooms and graves recorded in the publications and unpublished fieldbooks and other records. There are 15,190 entries recording more than 19,196 artifacts from the site; entries for 1,282 rooms, 108 houses, and 634 graves. It contains 11,023 records of artifacts published in the Olynthus publications (2,201 of which have been added to or corrected with unpublished information from the fieldbooks), and 4,167 records of unpublished artifacts recorded only in the fieldbooks or other excavation notes. The database ... is linked to a new site plan based on published and unpublished records, using Geographical Information System (GIS) technology. This allows users to plot the distributions of different types of artifacts on a map of the site or on plans of the houses, examine the relationships between the distributions of different types artifacts, and learn what was found in different houses and rooms graphically.Household and City Organization at Olynthus
30 March 2003: Tom Elliott
All content: © 2000-2004, Ancient World Mapping Center
